by James Long
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 mig
ht 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.
CHAPTER TEN
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 be
dclothes 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.
