Beneath the Soil

by Fay Sampson

  ‘Like now.’ There was bitterness in the brief reply.

  ‘So. It’s OK?’ Tom turned on his most winning smile.

  The man stood back a pace. ‘My wife’s up at the farm,’ he said shortly. ‘You can ask her.’

  Abruptly, he strode across the track in front of them and disappeared along the path on the other side into the wood.

  The Fewings looked at each other.

  ‘Rabbits, did you say?’ Millie’s voice was high with tension. ‘I don’t know what he was shooting at, but I don’t see why a rabbit should get him that upset.’

  ‘Still.’ Tom shrugged. ‘We’ve got the go-ahead. Lead on, Mum.’

  Suzie had been right about the clearing. In only a few steps, the view opened out. The farm was sited just under the brow of the hill. Just low enough to be sheltered from the northerly winds, Suzie reflected. The farmhouse and its barns made an L-shape around the yard, with an old covered well in one corner. The cob walls, on their stone base, had been whitewashed, but here and there the raw red earth showed through on the barn. The house was in rather better trim, but the window frames had not been painted for years. The black paint was peeling. Moss grew thick on the battered thatch.

  ‘There’s no sign of life,’ Suzie said.

  No chickens scratched in the yard. There was no contented moan of cows. No one was at work out of doors.

  Her words came back to her with an ominous echo she had not intended.

  ‘Oh, come on, then!’ Millie stalked up to the front door, elegantly casual in her jeans and ankle boots. She rapped the heavy knocker.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then a dog barked frantically. Simultaneously, a door Suzie had not noticed opened at the end of the long building. A woman in a floral wrap-around apron came out, overtaken by a noisy black-and-white collie. She was smaller than Millie. Her pale hair straggled around her shoulders in limp curls, a sad contrast to Millie’s white-blonde haircut, yet beneath the apron, her silk shirt and linen skirt looked unexpectedly stylish for this rural setting. Her thin face looked scared.

  ‘Yes?’ Her greyish eyes were round with questions.

  Suzie felt a sudden desire to protect and comfort her. She stepped forward impulsively. The collie ran forward, barking.

  ‘Mrs Caseley? We met your husband back in the wood.’ She could not help but see how the woman started back. ‘He said it was all right for us to come on up here and ask you where my great-great-grandparents might have lived in the 1850s. It was in the census that Richard Day was a labourer on the farm here. The address was “Cottage, Saddlers Wood”.’

  She felt the incongruity of what she was asking. It must seem so remote, so trivial, to whatever this frightened woman in front of her was undergoing. Suzie could not help but think, as she knew all the family must be thinking, of that distraught man who had burst out of the trees clutching a recently fired shotgun in his hand.

  The collie quietened under Millie’s stroking hand.

  Mrs Caseley struggled to get control of herself. She even managed a pale smile.

  ‘You’d better come in, then.’

  Suzie met Nick’s eyes questioningly.

  ‘If that’s all right? We don’t want to be a nuisance if it’s a bad time.’

  But Mrs Caseley had turned her back and was walking towards the half-open door. The Fewings looked at each other and followed.

  The kitchen was darker than Suzie had expected. A black Rayburn took up most of one wall. The central table and work surfaces were cluttered with unwashed crockery and pans. Mrs Caseley pushed back her hair from her eyes with a weary hand.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse it. I’m behind with things today.’

  Why? Suzie wondered.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said hastily. ‘We should have rung up to ask if we could come. It wasn’t fair to spring ourselves upon you like this.’

  Two steps led up into a living room. Suzie had expected to find it stuffed with old furniture, handed down through the generations. But it was sparsely furnished, and what there was looked cheap and modern. With a flash of insight, she wondered how much of the older stuff might have been sold off to pay bills. Probably what used to be here would have acquired antique status, snapped up to furnish the cottages and converted barns that people with higher incomes bought as second homes.

  A sadness came over her as she looked around her. A way of life was dying. The county where her own ancestors had lived and worked for so long was being taken over by incomers, who thought of it only as picture-postcard prettiness, or a series of quaint photographs in a calendar they would send to relatives back in the city.

  The others had fallen quiet.

  ‘Sit yourselves down,’ Mrs Caseley told them, with an effort at hospitality. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’

  ‘No, really,’ Suzie protested. ‘You don’t need to bother. We only wanted to ask you whether there are any cottages on the farm. Somewhere a married labourer might have lived and brought up his family.’

  But Mrs Caseley was already retreating into the kitchen.

  The Fewings sat on the hard-cushioned furniture looking at each other in some embarrassment.

  Suzie whispered to the children, ‘If she offers you something to eat, say no, thank you.’

  The picture was running through her mind of Philip Caseley, agitated, with the gun in his hand. How strained was this marriage, the two of them all alone up here, with money tight?

  She need not have worried. Mrs Caseley came back with a tray set with flowered cups and saucers of strong tea. Suzie was relieved to see that she hadn’t opened a packet of biscuits in their honour.

  She had thought that the woman hadn’t heard her question as she left the room, but the farmer’s wife said as she set down the tray, ‘Well, no. I can’t say as there are any cottages standing on the farm. If there were, I’ve no doubt Phil would have had them done up and sold them off. Lord knows we need the money. But there are some broken-down walls back in the woods. Cob needs to keep its hat and boots on. If you don’t put a roof on it and keep it out of the wet, it’ll sink back into the earth it was got from.’

  Suzie felt a thrill of excitement. The ruins of a cottage might not look much now, but she knew if she saw it, her imagination could supply the picture of what it had once been. She would be able to see Richard setting out to work on the farm in the early morning; Charlotte in her apron, feeding the chickens, making butter, scrubbing floors. And the children. How many of them were there? Six, she thought, before they packed up their belongings and took the long journey down to the coast and the dockyard town.

  She jerked back to the present.

  ‘Where can we find these ruins?’ Nick was saying. ‘Is it OK if we go looking in the woods? Your husband had been out shooting when we met him. We wouldn’t want to get mistaken for a fox, or whatever it was he was after.’

  The spoon rattled against the cup Mrs Caseley was handing to Millie.

  ‘You heard that, did you?’ There was a moment of silence. ‘No. You’ve nothing to worry about. Go back down the track until you see a smaller path going off to your left. It’ll be a couple of hundred yards down there. I hope you’re not wearing your best clothes. Likely as not it’ll be grown over with brambles. Phil and me, we’ve not much call to go down there.’

  ‘Do you come from Moortown yourself?’ Suzie asked. ‘I’ve got quite a few ancestors there. We might be related.’

  ‘I was Eileen Taverner before I was married. On my mother’s side it was the Hutchings. I can’t say as I know much about them before Granddad and Granny Hutchings. They kept a greengrocer’s shop. How far back they went, I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘I’ve got Taverners on my family tree! Charlotte Day’s father was a Taverner. He was a stonemason, out near the tollgate on the east road.’

  She had hoped Eileen Caseley might react with enthusiasm, and they could have enjoyed speculating about how close their relationship really was. But the woman’s pale, tired face sh
owed no reaction. The fear all the Fewings had sensed in the farmyard had faded, leaving a dull apathy. Suzie shivered. How nearly might this have been her own experience?

  Yet why was Eileen Caseley dressed so smartly this Saturday afternoon on the farm? And where had Philip Caseley been when he fired that gun?

  Nick got to his feet. ‘You’ve been really hospitable, considering we just walked in on you off the street. But we ought to let you get back to whatever you were doing when we turned up. So it’s back down the track and turn left?’

  ‘You’ll see it. There’s not many footpaths through those woods.’

  She did not try to detain them. Suzie sensed her relief that they were going.

  She gave Eileen her warmest smile. ‘I’m really glad to have met you. I spend so much time hunting up my ancestors from the past. And now and then I stumble across a relation I didn’t know about who’s alive today. I’m going to have to get my charts out and see if I can find where we fit together.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to go poking around in the past too much. You never know what you might find.’

  Mrs Casely watched them walk through her kitchen. But she did not respond to their thanks and farewells.

  ‘Well!’ Millie exploded, when they were safely across the yard. ‘Not exactly a bundle of fun, was she?’

  ‘Walk in her shoes,’ Tom said unexpectedly. ‘How would you like to live out here, with precious little money, and only two of you to run all this?’

  ‘It would give me the creeps. Do you suppose they have any children?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see any Lego on the floor. No homework books on the kitchen table or wacky DVDs in the living room. Guess, if they have, they’ve grown up and left.’

  ‘If it was me, I couldn’t wait to get away from this place. All these trees around it – I’d feel smothered.’

  ‘It occurs to me,’ Nick said. ‘That path she told us to take. It’s the one Philip Caseley went down when he left us.’

  ‘So? We’d better talk amongst ourselves while we walk along it,’ Tom laughed. ‘Let him know it’s humans coming and we’re not something for the pot.’

  They found the footpath without difficulty. Mrs Caseley had been right about the brambles. Nick pushed them aside where they arched over the path through the trees, but they sprang back behind them.

  The way led downhill, becoming softer underfoot. Presently sunlight glinted through the branches.

  Suzie stopped and gave a cry of delight. ‘This has to be it!’

  The mounds of red-brown earth, stippled with grit and straw, had almost melted back into the soil they had been dug from. They were cloaked with ivy. Around them, spears of fireweed flamed with bright pink flowers. Nettles spread a less welcoming blanket. Here and there, young trees were beginning to grow back. A little stream ran through the combe below.

  ‘At least she didn’t have far to carry water,’ Millie observed. ‘Could be worse.’

  A sudden snap made them start. Suzie was instantly aware how much her nerves were still on edge. They stood alert, listening.

  ‘Philip Caseley?’ Nick asked. He raised his voice to call. ‘Hullo, there!’

  Nothing answered him out of the darkness of the woods around them.

  ‘Probably just a squirrel landing on a dead branch,’ he said.

  ‘Or a deer,’ Tom added. ‘There must be some in this wood.’

  Suzie said nothing. The hairs on her arms prickled. She had an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched. It was silly. She had not yet recovered from the shock of that sudden gunshot. But if Philip Caseley was here, there was no reason for him not to show himself, as he had before.

  Nick let out his breath. Then he got out his camera. ‘I expect you want me to do the usual?’

  He moved around the ruins. Suzie could tell he was enjoying the play of sunshine on the mellow cob and the colourful fireweed. More photographs to enliven her files on the Day family.

  She stroked the rough cob. What a contrast it must have been to move from this rural backwater, labouring on the red soil, working with the cows and other animals at Saddlers Wood Barton, to St Nectan on the edge of the smoke-hung Victorian city, and the industrial work of a dockyard labourer. Had he been happy with a bigger pay packet at the end of the week? Or did his heart ache for the peace of these woods and the fields he had left behind?

  Nick had strolled away and was turning his lens on the stream and woods beyond. Tom went to join him, while Millie stretched out on the grass in the sunshine.

  ‘All done.’ Nick stowed his camera away at last. ‘Have you had enough?’

  ‘I think so.’ Suzie looked around regretfully. She had been filing away in her imagination Charlotte’s life here with her children. Had she been glad of the less lonely life in a street of terraced houses, with plenty of neighbours to turn to?

  How did Eileen Caseley cope on her own?

  They made their way on down the track towards the spot at the side of the road where they had left their car.

  ‘Hey up!’ Tom cried, as they came in sight of it. ‘Looks like we weren’t the only ones up here this afternoon.’

  A small green car was pulling out from the grass verge some way ahead of their own. It was only a moment before it was hidden by the hedges.

  ‘So,’ Millie said, stopping dead on the path. ‘It wasn’t a squirrel or a deer. There was someone else in the woods with us.’

  THREE

  ‘Should we phone the police?’

  Suzie was looking through the windscreen, but the rich tapestry of summer woods and meadows rolled past her unseen. She was seeing the round, scared eyes of Eileen Caseley in the farmyard; her husband plunging out of the trees with a dazed expression and his shotgun clenched in his hand.

  ‘Come off it, Mum!’ Tom exploded from the back seat. ‘We heard a shot and saw a farmer with a gun. Big deal!’

  ‘Didn’t you see his eyes, though?’ Millie protested. ‘It was like he wasn’t really there.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too many zombie films.’

  ‘Tom’s right,’ Nick said. ‘We startled him. I don’t suppose he gets many visitors, up there in the woods. Once he realized why we were there, he was perfectly civil. He even told us to go on up and talk to his wife. He’s hardly likely to have done that if he’s just come away from a spot of domestic violence. Besides, she certainly wasn’t suffering from gunshot wounds when we saw her.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Suzie admitted reluctantly. ‘But something had frightened her. What else could it be? Did you know that two women a week are killed by their ex or current partner? How many of those would have been saved if someone had stepped in earlier? I take your point that the police are hardly likely to take this seriously, but at least if we put down a marker and somebody else says the same, they’re more likely to pay attention to that next call.’

  ‘I leave that to you,’ Nick said. ‘Like Tom says, I’d feel a bit of a fool, reporting a farmer for firing a shotgun in his own woods.’

  ‘We don’t know it was in the woods,’ Millie argued. ‘The house wasn’t that far from where we met him.’

  An uneasy silence fell over the car. Suzie found her pleasure in discovering the ruined cottage where her great-great-grandparents very probably lived had faded into the background, replaced by more urgent present-day worries.

  Nick was out in the garden, weeding the blaze of colour in the flower beds. Tom and Millie had gone out for the evening with their teenage friends. Suzie, as so often, found herself drawn back into the study to write up her afternoon’s foraging into family history, while it was still fresh in her imagination.

  She cast a glance at the shoulder bag she had dropped on a chair. Should she take out her phone and call the police? She had been too busy preparing a meal to do it when they got home.

  But several hours had passed since then. The alarm she had felt at Saddlers Wood Barton was fading. It was easier to see it from Tom and Nick’s point of view
. There was no hope that the police would take her seriously. A farmer with a shotgun; a wife who looked alarmed when unexpected visitors called, but who had rallied round and entertained them with cups of tea? It sounded unconvincing, even to herself.

  There was just that sharp unease, gnawing away in the corner of her mind.

  She turned away and switched on the computer with an air of resolve.

  She updated the file on the Day family with a description of the remains of the cottage and its woodland setting. Had the buildings in Saddlers Wood been so lost amongst its oaks and hazels then? Later, she would add Nick’s photographs.

  She closed the file. What now? Should she go out and join Nick in the garden? See if there was anything watchable on television?

  She flicked through the printed sheets covering Richard and Charlotte’s lives. Charlotte had outlived Richard, dying in 1913.

  1913. An idea flashed through her mind. She had followed up her great-grandparents in the 1911 census, released only three years ago. But it had not occurred to her until now that her great-great-grandmother would still have been alive. A secret smile started to grow.

  Charlotte Day. She set to work.

  The eager smile faded. A puzzled frown took its place.

  An hour later she was holding out her results to Nick, where he sat enjoying a beer at the patio table.

  ‘Result!’

  Millie had just come in from her evening out.

  ‘Go on, Mum. What is it this time?’

  ‘Do you remember Charlotte Day? She was my great-great-grandmother. The one whose husband discovered that murder.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. She did it.’

  ‘Well, no. It’s a bit less dramatic than that. But still … I was remembering the time when Dad and I went looking for the church at St Nectan, on the outskirts of the city, where my great-grandmother grew up. I was searching for family graves in the churchyard, and expecting to find quite humble ones, buried under grass and ivy. But there beside the path was this red granite tombstone, with a railing round it, and on it were the names of my great-great-grandparents, Richard and Charlotte Day, and two of their sons.’