by James Long
‘It’s Glastonbury,’ they said to each other. ‘It must be all of it.’
It was a day’s walk there and a day’s walk back and she remembered the sense of disappointment when her father wouldn’t let her go with Ferney when he came to ask the following morning.
This won’t do, she thought. I mustn’t drift off. Mike will hate it. And with an effort, she lifted her drooping head and brought herself back to Ferney’s present voice.
‘. . . losing loads of money. All those relics and stuff, bits of saint’s toe bones and other rubbish they’d got from travelling con-men, all gone up in smoke. They couldn’t do a thing about rebuilding unless they got some money coming in so they needed something fresh to bring in the crowds again.’ He laughed and the pain seemed forgotten. ‘The first thing they did was really pretty silly. They suddenly announced they’d dug up Saint Dunstan. I expect they chose him because he’d been taught there as a boy, so they say. He’d even built part of the church, so he must have seemed to be a pretty good rabbit to pull out of the hat. They hadn’t done their homework, though. They shouldn’t have claimed they’d found him because he wasn’t missing in the first place. Someone pointed out that old Dunstan only had one body and the remains of that were still tucked up snugly in his tomb in Canterbury. They tried some cock-and-bull story about rescuing his body when the Vikings were raiding, but it didn’t wash so they left it a year or two then they tried again.’
He paused, smiling, and said to Gally, ‘Can I have a glass of water? My throat’s a bit dry.’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Mike, springing up.
‘Is this all right?’ whispered Ferney as soon as he was out of the room.
‘You can’t stop now. He’s enjoying it.’
Ferney sipped the water Mike gave him and carried on. ‘Like I say, they left it a year or two then they started digging again and guess who they found this time? King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, no less, and how did they know? Because with the bones in their coffins was that little lead cross with those Latin words on it and everyone took it for gospel truth, being a bunch of simpletons.’
‘So it wasn’t true?’ said Gally.
Ferney snorted. ‘No more true than if someone said today that they’d just dug up Mickey Mouse and his wife Minnie. The whole story of Arthur was flim-flammed up by some fanciful Welsh writer. He got everyone going about the Avalon business. Now those old boys in Glastonbury were pretty smart when it came to cashing in and they’d seen the way the Arthur story had caught on, so something that turned Glastonbury into Avalon was bound to be pretty good for trade. Still is, come to that.’ He chuckled. ‘I went there a couple of years back. There was a coach outing. I don’t usually like those things, but I wanted to take a look at the place again. Crawling with New Age magic shops, Avalon this and Arthur that. This cross must have helped to bring in millions over the years.’
‘That’s a bit disappointing,’ said Gally. ‘You are a cynic. I always thought Glastonbury was somewhere special.’ She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. Please don’t say yes, you always did, she begged silently, but Ferney just gave her a short look and Mike didn’t notice.
‘I’m not saying it wasn’t,’ he answered. ‘What with the Tor and all those Irishmen early on. You have to take a place like that a bit seriously because of what they believed even if you don’t agree. It was that lot that came later who spoilt it. They got into this competition, you see, about another sixty years on. Just pure advertising, that was what it was, our Saint washes whiter, that kind of thing. The people that ran Westminster Abbey started claiming Saint Peter laid the foundation stone or some nonsense like that, so good old Glastonbury had to go one better. Joseph of Arimathea founded theirs, they said. Some poet, you could always rely on poets to come up with a good slogan, made up a story about how Joseph took the Holy Grail there, then they said he planted his staff and it grew into the Holy Thorn. Now they sell you crystal balls and King Arthur tee-shirts.’
He fell silent and took another sip of water. Mike picked up the cross again. ‘So this has got a lot to answer for?’ he said.
‘Well they didn’t know, did they? They took it for what they were told it was. In some of the books which have that drawing in them, they say it should have been obvious. Those letters are twelfth-century style, but who knew that at the time? Not even the monk who carved them out, I’ll bet.’
‘How did you find it?’ Gally noticed the tone of wonder in Mike’s voice which showed he accepted it.
Ferney looked hesitant.
‘Go on,’ Mike said. ‘Just tell it. I won’t mind, at least I think I won’t.’
‘Well let’s say, there was this man. We’re talking about the sixteenth century now.’ He screwed up his face in thought. ‘You know what was going on. Fat Harry knocking six bells out of the monasteries and giving them away to his mates. Have you ever heard the story of little John Champernown?’
‘No.’
‘He was a decent enough man by all accounts. Went up to London from Devon on urgent business of some sort and when he got to the court, he saw a whole bunch of people kneeling down in front of old Henry so he thought he’d better kneel down too, just to show his respect, you know. He didn’t realize the others were all queuing up for goodies and before he could get up Henry’s men gave him some Cornish priory as a gift – St Germans, I think it was. He tried to explain it was a mistake so he could give it back, but they wouldn’t have it.’ Ferney wheezed with brief laughter.
‘Anyway, when the dust settled everyone started looting whatever they could. The king’s men were pretty quick at grabbing all the gold and silver, but there was still the lead on the roofs and there’d be people up there taking all kinds of risks, pulling it off. Now to start with that was the way the king wanted it, because it would let the weather in quicker and bring the stones down, but after a bit he realized he was missing out on quite a lot of money, lead being valuable stuff, so he set his commissioners to grabbing what was left and shipping it to London. His cronies were building their own palaces wherever they’d been given the monks’ lands and they were keen to give him a good price for stuff like that. Anyway a bit down the road from here there’s this place Montacute and a man called Wyatt . . .’
Montacute. Mons acutus, the pointed hill. Gally had heard of the hill long before she ever saw it. The story had gone round the countryside as fast as travellers could carry it of the miraculous cross that was dug up there, the Holy Rood that Harold worshipped, the cross whose name his troops shouted as they stumbled to defeat at Hastings. It was a weary way to Montacute, but she’d been before, in the darkness of a dangerous night watching for soldiers, although she could not remember why. The next time she went the castle had seeded other buildings, stone by stone, so nothing was left there but a small chapel and down the hill the French monks had built their beautiful monastery. The third time was when everything was changing.
Ferney tied their horses’ reins to the ring on the leaning door and they walked, awestruck, arm in arm into the desecration of the old priory church. It was newly vandalized, open to the sky at one end where the fire had burnt through the roof timbers. A great heap of wood, curled and sectioned grey-black by the fire, was piled up below the hole. Around the edges they could see from surviving, part-charred boards that they had been pews, the fire extinguished by the pouring rain that came once the flames had breached the roof. Soaked, smoke-blackened hangings drooped down from the walls and the smell of wet ash spread through the desolation as the priory’s final incense. A crow flew in through the stone tracery of the west window, where a few glass shards missed by the stone throwers gleamed. It swerved as it saw them, cawing loudly, and clattered out.
‘It feels like a crime,’ she said to her brother.
‘They’ve destroyed beauty that took time to make. That’s the crime. There’s nothing so destructive as belief.’
‘It’s all right for us. How are other people meant to know
what to believe?’
‘Follow your sovereign,’ he said wryly. ‘That’s what we’re told, isn’t it? We’re not sinning if we do what royalty says, even if they change their mind every other year. Do you know what I mind most about all this?’
‘No.’
He waved his arm at the land outside the windows. ‘No more vines. No more wine. Do you realize they’ve driven out all the wine-makers? Without the priors there’ll be nothing to drink but ale and that’s a dreary prospect, my sister-love.’
They went to the door and looked down the hill to where the men with the ropes and the sticks were laying out their geometric patterns. ‘It’s going to be one of the greatest houses in the whole country when it’s finished,’ said Ferney as they remounted, ‘according to Sir Thomas Wyatt.’
His voice, older, echoed the words ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt’ and she pulled herself out of it for a second time like a tired driver fighting off sleep. Brother and sister? How had that been? My God. They’d been rich that time round, it was clear, but brother and sister? How on earth would they have managed that? There wasn’t time to get to grips with it now.
‘So Wyatt bought a whole load of the Glastonbury lead for his new roof. There hadn’t been nearly enough at Montacute Priory,’ said Ferney, ‘and this man I’m talking about came across the wagons on the road. One of them had a collapsed wheel, so they’d had to shift all the lead off it before they could take the wheel off and get it all sorted out. He got there just as they were putting the last of it back on and he spotted this bit of lead they’d missed lying in the mud. He wasn’t a poor man so he wouldn’t have been tempted to keep it, but when he picked it up and saw the writing, he couldn’t bring himself to throw it on the wagon, knowing it would go in the melt with the rest, so that’s how it turned up, you see. Wyatt never built the house, mind – lost it when his son joined the revolt against Bloody Mary, then it got sold on two or three times before the Phelips finally took over the whole project. I expect they were glad to have the lead ready and waiting.’
It begged every question there was. Ferney made no attempt to explain the cross’s history in the four hundred years between that moment and the present day, but Mike accepted that.
‘And now you really want us to look after it, do you?’
‘Yes please. That and the drum, two of my special things. They’ll be better off with you.’ The unspoken words ‘when I die’ hung in the air.
There was a short silence and Mike seemed to feel a need to break it. ‘The Reformation,’ he said, ‘it’s unimaginable really – the change it must have made to life.’
‘There’s changes men bring about,’ said Ferney, ‘and there’s changes that come anyway and sometimes they’re better. King Henry and the Catholics, that was all about power. You know, whenever they get the chance there’s always strong men, or women come to that, who’ll start turning everything to their particular advantage. Before you know it they’ll have a hold on everything. It takes a hell of an upheaval to break that. Do you know what it took to get rid of slavery in this country?’
‘Slavery?’ Mike shook his head.
‘Well, peasants and that. The feudal times. It took the Black Death. Plague was the only thing that could loosen man’s stranglehold on his fellow men. The Wars of the Roses were the same. All right, maybe men started that on purpose, but it soon got out of hand. It was real gang warfare, but at least it got rid of the barons, thanks be. They slaughtered each other. You know, when they’re left to themselves men have always found ways to dominate their fellow men. Good men come in from time to time, but the difference they make usually crumbles. It takes natural disasters to undo the strangleholds of power. Disasters are the only things that work long term and that’s a terrible thing to have to say.’
‘You don’t have much faith in human nature,’ said Mike.
‘The humans you can have faith in are the ones who see things every other way as well as their own. The ones who just see it one way have it so much easier. They can grab the reins without having to stop and think. It takes a few of the horsemen of the apocalypse to stop them usually – and faith? Now that’s a truly dangerous thing.’ Ferney stopped talking as his face screwed up in pain again.
They did what they could. He wouldn’t take any more of the painkiller and it seemed best to take him home. Mike insisted on doing that and she sat by the fire waiting for him to come back, looking at the lead cross. She thought if she tried hard enough she probably could remember the cross itself as well as the surrounding circumstances, but enough was enough and it didn’t seem a good idea to push her luck now that Mike seemed to have taken to Ferney as never before. He also seemed to believe.
He was away for a surprisingly long time and when he finally came back, he looked thoughtful.
‘I didn’t really like leaving the old boy,’ he said. ‘He had another bad go when we got there and he still wouldn’t take any more of that medicine.’ He sat down and picked up the cross again. ‘What a day.’
‘What do you make of him now?’
‘I’m trying not to think about it. It goes against everything logical I believe in.’
He turned to her and there was clearly something on his mind. ‘Look, Gally, I stopped on the way back to think about all this. I don’t think he should be at home in the state he’s in.’
‘Mike. It’s his choice. He really hates being in hospital. I’m quite sure he wouldn’t go back there voluntarily.’
‘No, I wasn’t going to say that.’ He looked nervous. ‘I wonder . . . whether we shouldn’t ask him if he wants to come here.’
‘He can come here. He’s just been here.’
‘I don’t mean to visit. I mean to stay, if you feel you’re up to looking after him, that is.’
It should have been a moment of joy but to Gally it felt as if a trap had just snapped shut around her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
They moved him in on Sunday the twentieth of January after spending a busy Saturday putting the finishing touches to a bedroom for him at the other end of the house to their own. It had become impossible, in the ever-shifting shape of their triangle, for Gally to communicate to Mike the scale of her feeling about this. It was not straightforward fear, more a solemn apprehension at the weight of the destiny which he was unwittingly loading on to her. It seemed to her that he had just stacked the cards to hand Ferney a huge advantage in a game where she was the one who stood to pay the final price. If, however, she let him see the slightest loose end in her, he might start to unravel it and then she knew he would be horrified by what was revealed. He seemed to have left her no way out except to confront the situation in which Ferney would pass the last days of his life and the last days of her pregnancy in the closest possible contact with her in this house where their long bonding forces were the strongest. The old slanting stone drew her eye every time she looked out of a window like a finger pointing to a descending danger in the sky. Was it a friend? It felt like one, but if so it was an implacable friend who would tolerate no disloyalty. The stone had its silicon finger in her soul now and there seemed to be no denying it.
Mike had an occasional streak of stubbornness which only needed the wrong person to goad him to bring it out and the wrong person in this case was a pompous doctor who was very doubtful indeed about Mike’s plan. Dr Killigrew was absolutely certain that the best place for Ferney was hospital, possibly followed by a place in a hospice if he could find somewhere suitable, but he made the mistake of implying that if Mike only knew as much about these things as he did then he would see the overwhelming strength of his case. That was a put-down of the type Mike was well used to in the academic world and it was like a red rag to a bull. From that moment on he was absolutely determined that Ferney would come to Bagstone Farm whatever anyone said. Caught on the undeniable hook of the artefacts the old man had produced, he was looking after Ferney as if he were some elderly example of an endangered species.
‘I don’t really unders
tand why you’re not keener on this,’ he complained to Gally as they struggled into the bedroom with a set of shelves he had bought for Ferney’s books. ‘Let’s put it over there, near the bed.’
‘I . . . just don’t know if we’ll be able to cope,’ said Gally.
‘A bit further over. Do you think the work will be too hard? The nurse is coming twice a day and Mary Sparrow says there’s two or three others will come and help if you want.’
‘I’ll manage. Here?’
‘That’s fine, I’ll just get something to put under this corner. It’s rocking a bit.’
He went downstairs, leaving Gally wondering at the perversity of events. I suppose I just have to look on the good side, she thought. They’d be taking him back to hospital otherwise and then wouldn’t I be equally bothered? It didn’t help. It still felt as though she was setting out on an extremely hazardous venture. The coming birth felt remote and the issue it would bring seemed so theoretical that at times she could choose not to think about it. The coming death, too.
They went to get him together, loading the boxes of books Ferney had selected into the boot of the car with his clothes and making a collection in the hall of all the other things he had earmarked for his comfort – a radio, the TV, the video, piles of tapes. He had been waiting in his armchair and while Mike was outside, packing the stuff away, Ferney beckoned Gally to him. His voice had become noticeably weaker.
‘I know it’s not what you want.’
‘Oh, Ferney. I do really. I’m just . . . worried.’
‘Don’t be. It will be the way it has to be.’
The baby kicked hard and she put her hand on where its feet had made their presence felt.
‘Ferney, there’s a date in my life that I can’t avoid. My body’s counting down to it. The middle of February is coming whether I like it or not.’
