Landscape of Lies

by Peter Watson

  ‘Are you Nora?’ said Isobel.

  ‘Bloody awful name, isn’t it? Still, I should be grateful it’s not Edna or Ethel. Do you want flowers, or fruit?’

  ‘Fruit, please, and some help.’

  ‘Of course. This way.’ She looked across to Michael, sitting in the car, then led Isobel back into the greenhouse.

  Both women were gone for about ten to fifteen minutes. Michael switched on the radio in the car and started to listen to the breakfast-time news. In America no fewer than seven candidates had announced that they would be running for President, even though the contest was more than a year away. Michael wondered how many would survive the now regular media hunt for skeletons in their respective closets. He was just turning over in his mind whether to suggest a wager on the subject when Isobel reappeared. She shouted: ‘Michael, come and give me a hand, please.’

  He slipped out of the car and followed her. They walked down between rows of chrysanthemums, with high, dark green leaves, clammy from the thick atmosphere inside the greenhouse. At the end was a clearing in the forest. Here Nora had her office, a stove pipe which provided heat in winter, a chair, a phone and a primus stove to make tea.

  He smiled hello to Nora, who nodded back. She held some money in her hand and was obviously in the process of giving Isobel change. Isobel motioned to a box of apples. ‘Make yourself useful, Michael, please. Take that to the car.’

  Michael lifted the apples and carried them back to the Mercedes, thankful to be back in the fresh air and out of the warm wetness of the greenhouse. He put the apples on the back seat with the reference books. Isobel was a few paces behind, still chatting to Nora. This time Michael sat behind the driving wheel. Isobel waved goodbye to the other woman and got in alongside him. ‘Turn back to Laycock,’ she said and then swivelled in her seat to wave again.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I bought the apples as a sweetener—and it will be nice to have one every so often. I told her we were on a rally, one of those treasure hunt things, and that the flower was the next clue. I thought that would arouse the least suspicion.’

  ‘At half past eight in the morning? Oh, well, so long as she believed you. Go on.’

  ‘She recognised the flower—it’s a problem, I’m afraid. It’s almond.’

  ‘Almond?’

  ‘Yes. The good news is that almond grows near water. The bad news is that almond is almost unknown in Britain.’

  ‘That needn’t be a bad thing. If it is almost unknown, then the few places where it does exist might be quite famous locally. Could she help on that?’

  Isobel shook her head. ‘No. She said she only recognised it because her brother lives in Italy, where he has a garden centre, and almond is very common there.’

  Michael steered the car back into Laycock, back through the crush of people in the market. As he came out on the other side, he said, ‘Maybe I’ll have an apple now. Pass me one, will you?’ He chewed for a while, then said, ‘So, we have to get down on to the river. We need to rent a boat. Once we are actually on the water, we may see all sorts of things we can’t see from anywhere else. I can’t say I like the idea, though. Some trees last for hundreds of years but a rare one that doesn’t normally grow here …’ A thought struck him. ‘Hold on. If it is a rare tree maybe that means someone in the area, someone with a property that adjoined the river, was very keen on gardening and brought back rare plants from abroad, just like Peverell brought back rare horses. That happened a lot.’

  Excited now, he pulled the car to one side and reached for the map in the back of the car. Opening it he laid it on both their laps. He found the River Frome and traced its meanderings with his finger.

  ‘Yes … See! There seem to be three places where formal gardens or woods come down to the river. Here at Sayers Heath, then at Quarr Wood and finally Warmwell Green.’

  ‘But they could be eighteenth-, nineteenth—and even twentieth-century gardens.’

  ‘True, but there’s a chance that newer gardens, or woods, were built over earlier ones, because the micro-climate, or drainage, made it ideal for growing things. In any case, once we are actually on the river we can survey the whole bank, to be on the safe side. You didn’t by any chance ask that Nora woman where we could hire a boat?’

  ‘No. I thought it would sound odd.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’ He tugged at an eyebrow. ‘It will be in Dorchester, I expect. That’s the only big town around here.’

  It took about half an hour to get to Dorchester. Since it was still not yet nine o’clock, they stopped off at The Yeoman for another Thomas Hardy breakfast. ‘We can find out from the hotel where the boatyards are,’ said Michael.

  Around ten they nosed the Mercedes behind County Hall, as they had been directed, down around the local prison to where a number of small, red-brick industrial buildings huddled on either side of the river. There were warehouses, a small gasholder, a ship’s chandler’s, a railway siding that hadn’t been used in years and now led nowhere. They came to a dead-end road, and right at the bottom they saw a sign which read, ‘Waddon Wharf: Boats for Hire.’

  Michael pulled the car half off the cobbled road and on to the pavement. ‘Let’s take the rest of the apples,’ he said. ‘In case there aren’t any pubs on the river. Leave your handbag in the glove compartment—we don’t want it falling into the river.’

  They crossed the street and walked into the dock. ‘Now’s your chance to be bossy again,’ said Michael, grinning at Isobel. ‘Boats are your business.’

  A youth of about eighteen was sitting on a tin and slapping paint on to the upturned hull of a small boat. He was listening to a radio but looked up as they approached.

  ‘We’d like a boat, please,’ said Isobel.

  ‘Oars or powered?’ He didn’t move or stop painting.

  ‘Oh, with an engine of course.’

  ‘It’s three pounds an hour.’

  Michael stepped forward, taking his wallet from his jacket. ‘How long would it take to get to Wareham, do you think?’

  The youth shrugged. ‘Four hours. Maybe five.’

  ‘And how late do you stay open tonight?’

  Only now did the youth stop painting. ‘We’re open until eight all through June. But if you want the boat all day you have to pay in advance. Ten hours—that’s thirty pounds.’

  Michael handed over two £20 notes. The boy put the paintbrush on the top of the hull, got up, took the money and disappeared into a brick, lean-to shed which appeared to be the office. He brought back the change and then led them by a twisting path around several other upturned boats in the dockyard. This brought them to a short pontoon. The boat which the youth selected for them looked reassuringly new, though it was nowhere near as big as the craft on which they had sailed the Broads. In fact, it looked to Michael like little more than a rowing boat with an engine fixed to the back. The boy said it was called a skiff.

  He showed them how to start and stop the engine. He checked that there was a full tank of petrol, and filled a spare. He stowed it away, with some ropes, in a compartment at the prow of the boat. A square piece of board fitted loosely in the top of the compartment to keep out the rain and spray. A single oar, for emergencies in case of engine failure, lay along the bottom of the skiff. ‘This juice should last you all day,’ the youth said. ‘If it doesn’t, or if you have any problems, you can get petrol and technical help at Wool and at Wareham. Or you can phone us on the number painted on the engine casing.’ He pointed it out to Isobel. ‘And, don’t forget, rivers aren’t like roads. You keep right.’

  He held the boat steady as Isobel and Michael, carrying the apples, got in and settled themselves evenly. The small craft was much less stable than the bigger boat they had used in East Anglia. The youth pushed them off, waited for a moment to see how accomplished they were in boats and then, reassured that Isobel at least knew what she was doing, disappeared back to his paintbrush.

  At first the river was quite narrow and
ran quickly. Also, since they were still upstream from Godwin Magna and therefore on a part of the river they were not interested in, Isobel gave the engine full throttle. The sun was now high enough in the sky for its rays to beat on their skin with a good heat, though the breeze coming off the water was pleasantly cooling. It was shaping up into a perfect day.

  They had the river more or less to themselves, though as they passed Dorset College of Agriculture they watched one or two rather larger boats drawn up along the bank, being loaded with bags of fertiliser.

  It took them about forty minutes to get to Godwin Magna. As the familiar bridge, with its damp patches, came into view, Isobel slowed the engine so that they were moving through the water barely faster than the current. The hill to the village rose on their left, while on the other side a wide watermeadow, treeless, ran down the edge of the Frome for about half a mile.

  For the next hour and a half Isobel and Michael moved slowly downstream. Sometimes the road was in view, though more often it was not. In the flatter parts of the valley the watermeadows were marshy, stippled with reeds. In other places the trees came all the way to the edge, making the water dark and the air cool. As their eyes became accustomed to river life, they saw fish, moorhens, different types of ducks, sly water rats just nosing the surface.

  They came to Sayers Heath first but didn’t bother to stop. It was a modern pine forest, regulated and dense and probably no more than forty years old. There was no house associated with it, which might relate back to earlier times. There were no flowers of any description.

  They motored on, occasionally munching apples. Grainger might still be ahead of them but Michael found it was difficult not to relax in such idyllic surroundings. The sun, reflected in the water, was beginning to hurt their eyes. They passed a few boats but nowhere near as many as there had been on the Broads. They chugged by clouds of cow parsley with their acrid tang, wild rhododendrons, once crimson but now over, swags of dark blue berries they couldn’t put a name to.

  Quarr Wood they reached just after noon. This looked much more promising and Michael’s pulse quickened. The wood lay just beyond a very old stone bridge and below a meadow which had a number of curious, curved dips in it. Isobel noticed these and recognised what they were.

  ‘That’s where the river used to run,’ she told Michael. ‘There are places like that near the farm and all over Britain. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the monks straightened the rivers so that the water ran faster and turned their mills more efficiently. That means we should find a very old mill, or at least the site of one, at the end of this straight stretch. This is a medieval area now, just here. Keep your eyes peeled.’

  When they came to it, Quarr Wood actually straddled the river. The water here was wide with shingle banks. Two swans patrolled the shingle. To Michael, the trees looked like a mixture of the old and the new. There was a profusion of nettles, but what caught his attention was an old stone weir to one side of the river, where a tributary joined it, and an old wall which looked as if it had once enclosed a garden.

  Michael pointed to the weir. ‘That’s marked on the map as Blood River—see how red the water is, from the local soil. Let’s put in to the shingle bank.’

  Neither of them was exactly dressed to forage in the jungle of nettles and trees which lay beyond the shingle, and the going was hard. Nonetheless, they followed the broken-down wall as best they could and found that, at its far end, there were a number of other walls, equally ancient. Trees and undergrowth sprouted up everywhere.

  Breathing heavily from the exertion, Michael said, ‘I remember on the map that there is a Quarr Abbey marked in old-fashioned gothic type, meaning it’s a ruin. This must be it. If we could find a link between Monksilver and Quarr then this is the place where the almonds might have bloomed at one time.’

  ‘Look, there’s a lane over there, and a notice.’

  It was true. They had reached the road.

  They broke free of the nettles and undergrowth and emerged on to the tarmac. The sign was dilapidated but legible. ‘Quarr Abbey’ it read:

  Quarr Abbey was a thriving institution in the fourteenth century but fell into disuse after a local woman, who had given birth to a child by one of the monks, killed her infant, committed suicide and was secretly buried in the abbey graveyard. Under ecclesiastical law, the abbey grounds immediately became deconsecrated. When the scandal became public, no one could be found who would exhume the body. The monastery thus gave away the land to the local village of Quarton but no one wanted it and it was never used. In time, other bodies which, for one reason or another, could not be interred in consecrated ground, were buried here at Quarr. These were mainly suicides and for that reason Quarr Wood was known for a time in the Middle Ages and up to the Reformation as the Wood of Suicides. The abbey could not survive the scandal and closed in 1467.

  ‘Grisly,’ whispered Isobel with a shudder.

  ‘So the abbey was already a ruin by the time our story started. And no one would go near. That could make it an ideal hiding place.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  Michael hesitated. ‘We’ve made so many mistakes so far, I don’t want to make any more. This is a good bet but there’s plenty of river for us to see yet. Let’s go on, simply so that we can rule out any other sites. Then we can come back and study Quarr more carefully.’

  They retraced their steps through the undergrowth and along the side of the wall and returned to the boat. Isobel started the engine and they moved off. They stopped at Wool, where the Wise Virgin pub adjoined the river, and bought some sandwiches. But they were soon on their way again.

  Below Wool the river became very winding, almost doubling back on itself at several places. They passed another pine forest at Stoke Common, but this did not come near the river. Warmwell Green, when they came to it, was an eighteenth-century house and park, well tended, with horses and grazing cattle, all standing about as if they were waiting to be photographed for a postcard. Michael noticed some Roman remains here and there, and a very old stone bridge, called Holmebridge. There was also a priory at Holmebridge but its grounds did not come down to the river.

  Beyond that they passed under a railway bridge, chugged passed an oil tank and came to the playing fields of a school. They had reached Wareham. Isobel slowed. ‘Shall I go about?’

  ‘You mean turn, I suppose.’ He grinned and looked at his watch. ‘Three-thirty. Yes. It has to be Quarr Abbey. It’s the only place that fits. Let’s get back to Dorchester and drop off the boat. If they have room at The Yeoman we can stay there tonight and start in the museum tomorrow morning. There must be old plans of Quarr somewhere, which might help.’

  Going back, upstream, Isobel asked Michael to steer so she could sunbathe. They swapped positions—with difficulty—and she hitched up her skirt again to brown her legs. Michael tried hard to concentrate on the river banks. He lit a cigar.

  The breeze blew the smoke towards Isobel and she waved it back to him. ‘You make so many clouds, Michael Whiting, it’s a wonder you don’t make rain.’ She turned away.

  Sitting in the stern and watching the river more closely now that he had to steer, Michael was amazed at how unfamiliar it looked going upstream, compared with coming the other way. The overhang of trees was quite different, bends looked different, the approach to bridges was unexpected.

  They passed Quarr, Michael now convinced more than ever that that was where they would be coming back to. They passed Cranes Moor. At Woodsford, Isobel again took over the tiller and Michael sat near the bow of the boat, looking at the map. Woodsford was one of the villages where the church was on the river.

  Suddenly, Michael shouted. ‘I’ve got it! It’s not Quarr at all. Pull over, Isobel, let me show you. It’s on the bloody map!’

  It was easier said than done to stop, but Isobel managed to steer towards an overhanging tree which Michael could grab hold of. She didn’t switch off but put the engine into neutral and took the map fro
m Michael as he held on to the tree trunk.

  ‘Find Woodsford on the map,’ he said excitedly. ‘Follow the river down from Dorchester … got it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Right. Now go back upstream. What is written next to the village name in gothic type?’

  ‘Woodsford Castle.’

  ‘Correct. Now, look at what is written on the other side of the river, opposite Woodsford Castle.’

  ‘Frome Mead?’

  ‘No, next to that.’

  ‘White Mead.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Isobel! White Mead. White Meadow. Why is it called white meadow? Because white flowers used to bloom there. Because, when it was given its name, the white colour was notable. Why was it notable? Because it came from a rare tree, a foreign tree, a tree that no one else had.’

  ‘Why didn’t they call it Almond Mead?’

  ‘Maybe they did, some of the time. But it was White Mead that stuck. And the clincher is: where better to hide something than in a castle? This has to be the place.’

  ‘A minute ago, you were convinced it was Quarr.’

  ‘Isobel! It must be one of these two places. But my betting is on the castle now. Come on, let’s get back. There’s bound to be material on the castle in the local museum. We’re only four miles from Dorchester.’

  Isobel handed him the map, put the engine into gear and Michael let go of the tree. The boat surged forward. After a few hundred yards, the river wound to the right. ‘White Mead should be just round this bend,’ said Michael. ‘Keep over as close to the bank as you can. Maybe there’s still a trace of almond somewhere.’

  There were bushes sticking out from the bank now, rather than trees, and they had to proceed quite far around the bend before White Mead opened up in front of them. The mead was indeed flat and stretched back several hundred yards to where a forest started. There were, however, a few smaller trees clustered at one end of the meadow, and Michael was just about to ask whether Isobel thought they could be almonds when she cried out, in a half whisper, ‘Look! Another boat.’