Ferney (8 page)

‘Well yes,’ he said smiling. ‘There were two battles a bit later on. The Danes came back in 1001 and apparently burnt the place to the ground, then fifteen years later Edmund
Ironside thrashed them and that was definitely here. That one’s the seven hundred dead.’

‘Old Ferney was right, then?’

‘It’s no great secret. Everyone agrees about it. It was a crucial battle – one of the steps on the way to uniting England.’ He was animated now, warming to it.
‘It’s no accident, you see. This place was in one hell of a spot – a real bottleneck of key routes, one of the gateways to Wessex. Selwood Forest was one huge barricade right
across the neck of the west and the tracks through it met here. You just imagine, miles and miles of it, all fallen trees and roots and brambles. Completely impenetrable unless you had loads of
time and a sharp axe. If you wanted to take the quick route to get through it, you had to come this way and all these ridges and dips round here made it a great place to plan an ambush.’

‘What about Kenny Wilkins?’

‘Umm,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t know. His name is usually given as Cenwalh, but sometimes there’s a “ch” on the end. You’ve got to see it all in
context.’

That was code for ‘Don’t interrupt, this may take some time.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, because this was when she felt closest.

‘Okay. The Romans had gone and what they’d left behind was pretty chaotic. Fat cats, merchants and bureaucrats still trying to live like nothing had changed. Now, I’m sure
I’ve told you, the Romans had always hired German mercenaries to look after their turf round here and the British chieftains thought they’d do the same.’

She knew it, but she let him talk.

‘Anyway, come the early sixth century the Scots and the Picts up north started threatening the south so the British chieftains hired a load more Saxons to help out. The trouble was the
British didn’t get round to feeding and paying them properly, which is not very sensible when you’ve got a well-armed cuckoo polishing its armour in the middle of your nest. The
Saxons’ homelands were getting very overcrowded, but the whole of Britain had less than a million inhabitants. It must have seemed like heaven, so they moved in and grabbed the south. Their
mates the Angles came in and took over a bit further up-country and after that the poor old Britons were easy meat. There was only one thing that stopped the Saxons spreading west. Do you know what
that was?’

She thought she did, but she shook her head.

‘Selwood Forest,’ he said. ‘Coit Maur, the Britons called it, the Great Wood.’

The name rang in her head, wild and thrilling.

‘The bit of Somerset to the north wasn’t much good,’ he went on, ‘the levels were flooded most of the year. They only dried out in midsummer, the rest of the time the
settlers had to live on the higher ground. That’s how it got to be called Somerset. Anyway the Great Wood stopped the Saxons heading further west. They settled in the lush river valleys round
Salisbury and got a bit soft. The Britons from the Great Wood started fighting back and gave them a bit of a pasting, so the Mercians, who had moved into the Midlands, came down to help sort it
out.’

He saw the flush on her face and wondered, as ever, that the dry dust of history had such direct, warm impact on her. ‘This is where your Kenny Wilkins comes in. The Mercian king was
called Penda and he did a deal with your Kenny. Cenwalch was king of Wessex, you see, and he married Penda’s sister to glue it all together. Anyway, something went wrong. Kenny didn’t
fancy her, maybe, and he gave her the push, so Penda exiled him to East Anglia. Then Penda screwed up. He took a huge army up north and got himself killed by a tiny bunch of Oswy’s Bernicians
– Northumbrians, if you like. He must have been pretty incompetent.’

‘So Kenny was back on top?’

‘Cenwalch came back from exile and took charge, but he had all these young bloods who were demanding land of their own and the best bet was to the west. Every other direction had seasoned
armies blocking the way, but the west, beyond the Great Wood, was anyone’s guess. So in 658, Kenny Wilkins and his men took on the Britons at Peonnum and that was pretty much that for the
Britons – next stop Cornwall and I hope you like large lumps of granite in your farmland.’

‘Poor Britons,’ she said, and she really felt it, turning his words into a mental landscape of burning huts and people fleeing terror-struck into unfamiliar lands.

‘I don’t know. They’ve done quite well down in Cornwall. They’ve been ripping off the tourists ever since.’

‘So, it could easily have been here, couldn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘The battle. Peonnum?’

‘There’s no direct evidence.’

‘Just a long tradition?’

‘Just a long tradition.’

She looked at him, transported, warm and open and they both stood up. She nestled into his arms. ‘I love listening to you like that,’ she said.

‘I know, but I still don’t know why.’

She kissed the side of his neck. ‘It all makes more sense. I feel . . . fuller maybe, as if there’s more of me alive.’

‘Medieval history as an erogenous zone?’ he said in tones of mock wonder.

‘Do you have that effect on all your students?’

‘I wish I did,’ he said and kissed her hard.

They swayed together towards the seat cushions, but the gap was too narrow and the folding table jammed in Mike’s back.

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘The caravan as contraceptive.’

There were a few seconds of silent hurried work as they collapsed the table into the gap and tried to remember the brain-teasing arrangement of the cushions that more or less added up to a
mattress, then their clothes were on the floor and the caravan was creaking and complaining, semaphoring their lovemaking to the darkening world outside.

Gally swayed over Mike, leaning down to kiss him as she moved, seeing unbidden in her head a kaleidoscope of faces that would keep superimposing themselves over his, strangers’ faces that
seemed far from strange. At the moment when she should have been centred on the small compass of their own unity, she was seized instead by an overpowering, bewildering and wonderful feeling that
the whole of her surroundings had reached in and drawn the envelope of her body outward so that she encompassed the trees, the stream, the walls and all the diffuse green life that made up the old
farm. It was a wild, pagan moment and as she felt the accelerating stirrings of their movement she looked up and seemed to see straight through the caravan wall to the house front beyond where a
phalanx of unknown friends were silently cheering. In the climax that immediately followed, the old plywood sagged under them, sliding them sideways against the base of the seat and she knew for
absolutely certain in that same second that she was now with child.

It was only when he heard the racket of an unsilenced exhaust approaching down the lane that Mike remembered to tell Gally.

He poked his head in through the door. ‘Hey! Here’s the guy who’s coming to do the digging. I never thought he’d arrive so early.’ He said it as if she should know
about it.

Gally put down her coffee mug and went outside. ‘Digging?’ she said.

‘You know, to find where the water’s coming from.’

‘No, I don’t know. Who is he?’

He heard the storm warning in her voice, cursed himself for carelessness and sought refuge in evasion.

‘He works for that farmer. Surely I told you.’

A yellow JCB swayed in through the gate in a series of jerks accompanied by blasts of noise punched upwards in gouts of black smoke from its exhaust pipe.

‘Hold on, Mike,’ Gally called after him as he went to meet it. ‘We haven’t talked about this. Oh hell,’ she said and went after him.

The driver was young, with a thin, indoors face. He switched off, ignoring them completely, and began to fiddle with a newspaper and a sandwich box, shielded by the glass walls of his cab. Gally
was appalled by the size and the brutality of the machine. The rusting, bent spikes along the front of its battered shovel spelt violent ruin. This wasn’t the right tool for their first
overture to the house, of that she was sure. This was a tank, a battering ram, a diesel rapist.

‘Mike, we can’t do it like this,’ she said. ‘It’s going to make a terrible mess.’

He looked harassed. ‘What did you expect, love? We can hardly do it with a trowel.’

‘You should have asked me. There must be another way. I can use a spade.’

‘I did say someone was coming to look at the water.’

‘Oh come off it. That’s like saying Genghis Khan was doing voluntary service overseas.’

Mike looked at her, seeing the extent of her distress and how much further it might go. He was about to reply when the driver finally opened his door and climbed down, silencing them both. He
nodded to them and scratched his chin. There was a lot of it to scratch. Some twist in his DNA had given him far more chin than forehead, giving the impression, confirmed as soon as he began to
talk, that his mouth rather than his brain led the way.

‘So what’s it all about then?’ he asked, looking around.

‘We need to dig a channel,’ said Mike.

‘We’re just discussing it,’ said Gally simultaneously.

He looked at them and shrugged. Gally knew she hated him already.

‘You discuss it all you like,’ he said. ‘The meter’s running,’ then to her amazement and indignation he walked over to the corner of the house, unzipped his flies
without a second’s hesitation and released a stream of steaming urine on to the corner of the stonework.

‘Where the HELL did you find HIM?’ Gally hissed.

‘I told you. The farmer, wotsisname, Durrell. He works for him.’

‘We can’t let him do it. He won’t do it right.’

‘Look, Gally,’ Mike hissed as the man was zipping himself up, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. There’s no easy way of draining it without making a
mess. We’ve got to do it.’

He addressed himself to the driver. ‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name.’

‘Slash.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Slash, you know, like Guns ’n’ Roses.’ He mimed playing an invisible guitar with a lot of unnecessary hip movement that went on for far longer than necessary. Gally
looked at the corner of the house where steam was still rising. More likely to be from his personal habits, she thought.

‘Right. Slash. Er, it’s just that we need to be very careful not to do too much damage. We’ve got to find where the water’s coming from, okay? Then we want to dig a
channel to steer it away from the house.’

Slash looked around and whistled for a bit. ‘Going to be a mess,’ he said eventually. ‘Can’t help it, can you? I mean, water and earth, what you got? You got a mess,
right?’

‘Well, surely, if we start at the house where it’s coming in and just follow it backwards?’ said Gally, fighting to be reasonable.

Slash laughed. ‘You ever seen it done?’ he said. ‘Scoop it out, the water comes in, don’t it? Sodding hard to see where it’s coming from. I mean I’ll have a
go but don’t expect miracles.’

‘There must be some way of telling,’ said Mike. ‘Suppose we dug holes here and there to see which ones fill up?’

‘Yeah,’ said Slash, ‘or get one of them meters the Water Board uses.’ They thought he was being helpful for a moment, but he soon dispelled that. ‘Only thing is,
I’m here now, aren’t I, so there’s fifty quid on the clock for that and it’ll be ticking up while you’re messing about.’

‘What about a water diviner?’ Gally said and neither of them bothered to reply. She found her hands clenching at her sides. All the frustration she felt at the brutal arrogance of
ignorant men was focused in her fists. Mike was wearing a hunted expression. She looked at him, then past him as a man walked slowly into view along the lane, a man who would help –
Ferney.

She ran to the gate and he stopped, his face lighting up with a degree of expectation that astonished her.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘How is it with you?’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Well, no. Not fine at all. We’ve got a problem. I just thought you might have an idea.’

‘Go on then.’

‘This horrible man’s come to dig some drainage ditches and we don’t know where the water’s coming from and I’m absolutely certain he’s going to ruin the whole
place if we leave him to it and I just can’t stand that happening and I thought, well, you knowing the place so well, you might . . . have some idea.’ She tailed off, thinking it
sounded rather silly, but he smiled at her with an expression that stripped years from his age and brought a huge involuntary smile from her in exchange. She felt much better after that.

‘I think I might,’ he said, and she opened the gate for him.

She followed him over to the other two. ‘Good morning, young Eric,’ said Ferney to the digger driver and the unmasked Slash looked a little sheepish.

‘Morning, Mr Miller,’ he said.

Ferney made a tiny nod to Mike and turned and surveyed the house, glancing back at Gally as if considering. He went to the right-hand end of the wall, thought for a bit and tapped at the ground
with his stick.

‘It started coming in about here,’ he said, and Gally pushed a broken piece of wood into the earth to mark the spot. He turned and stared towards the trees up the slight slope,
parallel to the road. After a minute or two of concentration, he walked slowly past the caravan to the hedge about thirty yards from the house.

‘Back here, I’d say,’ he called, pointing again. ‘A line from here to the house.’

Gally, following him, pushed in another stick. ‘A straight line?’ she said.

‘Near enough.’ He considered again. ‘Get young Eric to start this end, in case I’m a bit out, and tell him to go gently.’

Slash started up his digger, noncommittal. Mike, his face showing strong reservations, came to watch. The digger crashed through the undergrowth, crushing a bush, and Gally winced. It rocked to
a stop, pivoted, and the grab came down for its first gouge of earth. It was on the third scoop that they heard, over the noise of the engine, a scraping sound. Looking into the hole, they saw that
the digger had uncovered the top of an earthenware pipe, scarring but not breaking it.