Moonspender

by Jonathan Gash

  "So. Pals, hey?" He actually wrung my hand.

  We said so long, one more uneasily than the other. I left and caught the bus. Ledger was leaning on the church gate as I passed. Neither of us waved, glared, or got arrested.

  8

  You'll never believe this, but when I got back to my cottage, quadruple mortgages and all, the water was on. I would have enjoyed it—no more dipping grotty water from my garden well—but it reminded me of Sir John's face as it imploded in another guffaw, at my expense.

  Fried bread and tea later, I was examining a map. Ordnance survey, contour colors, and a key showing windmills and churches. I like old maps, always have. From the momentous ones, like Mercator's firsts, to those of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Colony in the New World, they've held fascination. They're great works of art. They betoken artistic creativity—which is more than you can say for anybody or anything since 1918.

  I searched my area of the Eastern Hundreds for clues, landmarks, anything of significance, and drew a circle with my school compass, a derelict brass pivot aspiring to antiquehood. It included Dogpits Farm, site of poor George Prentiss's last stand, ancient long barrows the map marked as authentic—multo of these hereabouts—the ancient Brits' defense earthworks, anything. I started to spot in it major finds, from my store of newspaper clippings, scribbled rumors, inked queries on the local auctions.

  I looked at it, and looked.

  Five glasses of my homemade pear wine later, I was no wiser. Then Tinker phoned to say (a) Mrs. Ray of Dedham was no clandestine dealer, and (b) Mannie's complex life had taken a nasty turn, since a husband had learned of Mannie's unprecedented influence on his wife's nocturnal activities. "He's no reserve antiques left, Lovejoy. Even sold that white-faced enamel longcase clock he wuz always bragging about." I moaned, tears starting. These white-facers are almost unheard of, now that the known world's swamped by German repro brass-faced naffs.

  "Any news on Ben Cox?"

  "Nar, Lovejoy. Clean as a virgin's hankie, thank Gawd. I'm getting Fixer Pete like you asked. And Tom Booth, but he'll be night, o'course." He meant Boothie being a poacher. " 'Ere, Lovejoy. That Mrs. Ryan."

  "Eh?" Mrs. Ryan as well as the rest of East Anglia "What'd she want?"

  "Slipped me a quid in the Black Buoy, to tell you she wants your answer by tonight."

  Oh, hell. Her neffie estate manager's job. I needed a manager of my own, not more labors. I told him well done and, knackered as I was, went for Toffee and started out to Ramparts Comer, home of our village's resident writer. He'd sent Ben Cox.

  Billiam—his idea of a Christian name, nobody else's—lives in solitude interleaved with orgies. Our village is a puritanical old dump, yet everybody's thrilled whenever the strobes get going over Billiam Cutting's old barn. Villagers go about saying it never ought to be allowed and that, but are inwardly desperate to see those sinfully fleshpotty activities. He's Real Life. Women go out of their way to bump into him, even if it only means helping him to stagger home from the Treble Tile. Then they oh-so-casually let drop: Billiam said to me today . . . and set everybody wondering.

  The farm—farm is a laugh—was somnolent when I plodded in. He's long since let his gates rot. Two of his three sheds have tumbled-in roofs. Windows gape. Birds saunter in and out through (repeat: through) walls. Emit trees burgeon yearly, then scatter their bushels to fester among weeds. Billiam hardly notices the harvests. He's either sloshed, scribbling dementedly, or both. I found him snoring on a sack amid the agricultural debris and shook him awake.

  "Bill. It's me. Lovejoy."

  "Mmmmh?" He came awake slowly, chomping and swallowing and rubbing his face. He peered, pulled himself up, cast about and found a cobwebby bottle. Sighing and burping, he shared the wine. Last year's elderberry, too sweet by a mile. Idly I gazed around while his hooch blasted his brain back into its customary orbit. The place was a mess. Gruesome farm instruments rusted. Planks flaked. Disintegrating sacks, boxes unrectangled, plant pots in bent columns. Jubilant spiders festooned comers, spinning webs almost audibly. A few bulbs had hopefully shot green from a dissolving wheelbarrow. I let Toffee out. She started to roam, putting her feet down gingerly, with her nose going like a slumming rabbit.

  "God, Bill. This is truly rural." I hate countryside. All these emblems of uncontrollable nature really depressed me, but there was a lovely old Suffolk scythe rusting on the wall. I'd try to talk him out of that, soon as I got a minute.

  "You wouldn't think so, Lovejoy. Not with the goings-on round here in the black hours."

  Ramparts is a few acres wedged in by Mrs. Ryan's estate, the dense ancient Pittsbury Wood, Dogpits Farm, and our village.

  "Owls and foxes, eh?" I sympathized.

  "People. If I'd been a crime writer I'd have gone out to watch."

  "Still turning out bodice-rippers, eh?" Bill writes six romance novels a year, under six pseudonyms. He has it down to a fine art, his basic plots on wall charts.

  "Why not?" Mention of his trade always makes him barbary. He gets a lot of hassle from posh writers. "What's wrong with simply entertaining people? Folk like romance. Soap beats eternal in the human breast. So literary nuts call my stuff breast-sellers? I outsell them by two million copies a year."

  "Don't ballock me," I said, narked. "I'm swigging your rotten plonk, remember."

  He mumbled a sorry, and with true writer's skill uncorked another dusty bottle with his teeth. I wish I could do that. "It was all right sending Ben Cox to you, wasn't it, Lovejoy? He was asking for somebody who knew the local antiquities game."

  "Aye. That's what I came about." The fresh bottle was better, thank heavens. "Is he okay?"

  "Ben? Straight as a die. Known him since school days, same class in St. Edmundsbury." He smiled, a bit shyly. "I ask him a few historical details for my romances. The authentic touch."

  That settled, I now wanted my pen'orth. "So he wasn't anything to do with the night noises? I mean, Ledger's already had me in."

  "Typical bobby. Doesn't he know you're a born townie?" He chuckled reminiscently. "No, Lovejoy. That was some blokes over Pittsbury Wood, playing silly sods. Probably badger-baiters. They were talking about them last night at the Treble Tile. Good wine, Eh?"

  "Great," I said.

  "Here, Lovejoy." He watched me persuade Toffee into her basket. "What do you think of Tanzie Heartsease for my new pseudonym?"

  "Great," I said thinking, God.

  "Lying sod." He went narked, really showed a flash of threat, gone as quickly as it arrived. "Still, Lovejoy. Your new ladyfriend likes my books, if you don't."

  "My who?" I was smiling at his merry banter, ready to leave with Toffee reclining like a princess on a palanquin.

  "Mrs. Prentiss." He came with me, grinning. "I heard you were chatting her auntie up in her new restaurant."

  Smiling at my most sincere, but now with difficulty, I cracked back that my acquaintances would rather read a train ticket than his gunge, but was so shaken I reeled in to the White Hart as soon as I was round the bend in the road. Billiam had left me the equation: Darling Candice equals newly widowed Mrs. George Prentiss. Couldn't be true . . . could it?

  The antique that Mrs. York wanted suddenly deserved priority. Things were cobbling together to form a sinister picture, with me in the foreground, too near poor dead George.

  "Hellfire, Toffee. Look at its size."

  The bull heard and raised its gigantic head, giving me a stare. The field was huge, stuck to the north end of Pittsbury Wood. A thick hawthorn hedge rimmed the footpath that runs from the river path to the road half a mile off. A herd of cows noshed grass in the next field. I leaned on the gate, examining possibilities.

  Toffee raised her head, yawned, settled back. She'd grown heavier as I'd walked from the White Hart—it's about a mile—so I stuck the basket on the ground. And saw Tom Booth. He grinned at my squawk of alarm.

  "You stupid burke, Boothie." I was already nervy, out here a million leagues from civilization.

&nbs
p; "I made enough din, Lovejoy."

  The old devil had slunk up to scare me, his joke. He's a stocky man, pale and deep, not at all the wiry poacher of legend. I eyed him uneasily in case he was carrying dead. He's all bulging brown tweeds. This very moment he might be a walking gibbet, slain creatures dangling under that jacket. He's our village billiards champion. Of course not as good as Mary Queen of Scots—between love affairs she was actually the greatest billiards champ in history—but able on the table. "It's all right, Lovejoy. I'm clean."

  I'm not really squeamish. No, honestly. But life's important to a pheasant, isn't it? Bound to be. He takes orders at the Queen's Head.

  "Admiring Charleston, are you?" Boothie spat expertly, lit a foul clay pipe. "Yon big bugger killt George Prentiss."

  "Aye. What was George doing strolling across Charleston's field at night?"

  "Dunno. I was seeing to the river, down Seven Arches." "Which way was George going, Boothie?"

  "Gawd, Lovejoy. I'd not thought of that." We looked at the terrain, thinking. The footpath crosses the field, then forks right through Pitts-bury Wood; left brings you out at Dogpits. Well, so what? Round here, footpaths are free and literally thousands of years old.

  "Was George coming or going?" I wondered aloud, keeping my voice even. "Message in a bottle if you can find out, Boothie, eh?" For all I know these old country wallahs might be able to tell from looking at the floor, like Red Indians.

  "Right. I'll listen out. O'course," he added, ever so casually, "this isn't Charleston's usual run. He's normally in Little Tom."

  Farmers give fields names. The biggest field on a farm is called Big Tom, the field we were looking at. So Little Tom was the one with the herd.

  Odderer and odderer. "Did Charleston jump that far gate?" The five-barred gate between the two fields.

  Boothie guffawed. "Him? Jump a gate? Yon bugger'd go through it, open or shut. Only thing he jumps is cows. Evil bastard." The gate looked undamaged.

  Boothie's gaze was serene. He nodded when he saw I'd got the point. The gate had been opened when George was halfway across, and Charleston had flattened him like a night express. God. I turned to see

  Boothie moving silently off at a languid lope, his trousers horribly baggy.

  I called after him, "Does Ledger know somebody opened it?"

  "Who'd tell him?" he said over his shoulder.

  "Boothie." My tone must have done it. He paused while I asked, "Was it you making that racket in Pittsbury Wood last week?"

  He laughed, knocked out his pipe and like a good countryman spat to fizz out the glowing ashes. "Ever heard a noisy poacher, Lovejoy?" He shook his head at the mystifying incomprehension of townsfolk.

  "Campers, then?" I yelled after.

  "None hereabouts since the major fetched hounds."

  The sky was flooding darkness on a chiller wind. The woods began to make that near-whistling when the breeze stiffens off the sea estuary. The great bull was suddenly still, his massive head raised toward the trees. Had he heard something? The forest seemed to loom as the rain clouds lowered in an unpleasantly stealthy collision, a gathering of ominous strength.

  "Here, Boothie," I said, intending a joke, but the track was empty. Gone. There was only me and the bull, standing in the path of something primeval and horrid. Meteorologists might describe it as a simple thunderstorm, but it was me standing alone out here, not them. I began whistling loudly and walked off at increasing pace.

  "You're no bloody help," I muttered crossly at Toffee. She didn't even wake, idle little sod. Typical female, leaving me out here hurrying to get us both safe home from that eery shrilling darkening wood, and her safe under the blanket.

  A tractor bloke pulling a cart laden with sugar beet gave me a lift to Bures. I know Don vaguely, a demon fast bowler who cracks the bravest—read daftest—skulls on our cricket team. He joked about doing it again next summer. They'd dropped me from the team after a fight with an umpire, honestly not my fault. I mean, umpires blind as a bat shouldn't be allowed, right? Don put me down at the old church by Bures crossroads to catch the bus to St. Edmundsbury. He thinks I'm odd. I think he's barmy.

  "See you next Lammas, Lovejoy." Our cricket championship cup matches begin on Lammas Day, the old name for August First. He passed Toffee down. "If you've still got your cricket pitch, that is," he quipped. "Manor Farm's reclaiming your field. Mrs. Ryan, isn't it?"

  "Reclaiming?"

  "It's on lease, a peppercorn rent." He was sad-faced at the calamitous news.

  "So what? There's that Long Tom field near Pittsbury Woods, big enough."

  His face changed. "You'm orff yor 'eed, booy," he said, his dialect showing sudden stress. "Lammas Day's bad enough."

  No pausing, no matter how I yelled what the hell was he on about. I watched him go. None of that made real sense. I crossed to wait for the bus, twenty minutes.

  Nothing important of course—I ask you, village cricket—but odd. In East Anglia the cricket season's not long: April to October if the year's a record-breaker for fine weather. I waited, restless.

  What had I just thought, that was so disturbing? The months of the year. What's worrisome about April? April? How innocent can you get? And October? October means soggy wet autumn, Michaelmas, All Saints, Harvest Festival at church with that bloody awful visiting organist from Wivenhoe making a right pig's ear of Purcell. But her breasts are lovely, and her smile sideways for us wavering warblers to start "Pilgrim," my favorite, would melt a sinner's heart. . . .

  "Are you coming or not?"

  "Eh?" I said, startled. The bus was here and the driver bawling down. "Don't yell your head off, Dick. You've woken my frigging cat."

  Toffee grumbled all the way to St. Edmundsbury. Old dears gave her their undivided attention. She loved it. I got unanimous blame for feeding her wrong; she didn't say a word in my defense. Is that typical, or is that typical?

  The Suffolk Independent Archeology Trust was not the massive building I'd led myself to expect. Think more of a broom cupboard. It was pure luck I found it (a notice by an old cobbler's announced a Grand Lecture by Ben Cox, M.A. The office address was given). Twenty minutes later I was clumping up the bare boards of a condemned terrace building to the third floor garret where Ben Cox sat working. His desk was half. I mean that literally; he'd sawn an old Victorian desk to get half of it in. The crude wall shelving was of suspiciously similar wood.

  My expression must have given me away as usual. He nodded, smiling shyly. "Can we take for granted that I'm ashamed of practically everything in sight?" he suggested. A joyful welcome nonetheless. We dithered about whether to shake hands, decided it would be too forward.

  "I admire your office," I said. "Well, you liked my cottage."

  He laughed, nodding. "Tit for tat, eh?" I sidled in, no mean feat. A stool, as in bar, was the only other resting place. I looked round, hung Toffee's basket behind the door.

  "Ben," I said as he made coffee cackhanded in a roadmender's billy-can. "You have no funds, a handful of burning-heart volunteers, and an eviction notice with the ink still wet. Right or no?"

  "Right."

  "To continue: Your repeated petitions to councillors have failed. You're broke. Mmmmh or nnnh?"

  "Mmmmh."

  "Furthermore you saw me on telly, and somebody told you I was maybe daft enough to help on spec. Another mmmh?"

  He stirred the coffee agitatedly, red-faced. "Lovejoy. I don't think you're off your trolley. But if anybody needs a divvie it's us."

  He sat, coffee-making forgotten. "We're losing the battle. The pillagers, the treasure-hunters. They hear of an ancient burial mound and go marauding in gangs, digging anywhere. It's these . . ."he hesitated, grasped the nettle, . . . "these antique dealers who've done it. They pay the earth . . ."

  "Two lumps, please."

  "Sorry." He meant for sounding off. He passed me a cup of foul brew nearly as bad as mine. "They make fortunes while our country's treasures are plundered wholesale."


  "I've heard," I said wryly.

  "Present company excepted." He gave a red-faced grin. "I get so angry. They're carrion."

  "Who?" His eyes widened as I said, "Ben, you're an old soldier at this archeology game. I don't believe that you see a bloke misbehave on a ninth-rate telly show and suddenly decide to recruit him in your private war with a load of moonspenders."

  "No. It's worse than that. We've had word of a big find." He became morose, pained. "One of our people intercepted a drawing of a bronze animal." He had it ready to hand, sly old dog—or maybe he simply wept over it all day long.

  An outline drawing, not bad at that. A leopard or panther, something ferocious and leaping in feline grace, lovely. My throat had dried. Jesus, but if it was copied from a real bronze it . . . "Intercepted how?"

  "You won't believe it, Lovejoy. A relative in Australia answered a newspaper advert for an ancient Roman bronze. The wording's on the reverse."

  Cut-out letters and words from newspapers, stuck to the card. Roman bronze found Suffolk East Anglia this year price negotiable watch box column for contact.

  "The old game, eh?" Anybody who answers the Advertiser's box number is a potential customer. The Advertiser susses them out, ensures they don't include a troublesome percentage of Fraud Squaddies, then readvertises a price for "the advertised object." The undaunted buyers who write are then contacted by phone, the precious object is swapped under a pub table somewhere and lost to the so-called clean so-called aboveboard world forever. Believe me it's a hairy, scary voyage. Blood flows merrily in its churning wake. George Prentiss'll tell you.

  "Don't tell me," I said. "You alerted Space Control, who did sod all." "The Aussie police kept watch on the paper, but no further advert appeared." His eyes reproached me soulfully. "They really did try, Lovejoy." "Or worse."

  "Worse? What could be worse?"

  He hadn't linked George's death with the problem, but I had. "Tipping them off's worse, Ben."