Ferney (7 page)

‘Morning, my muffeties,’ she said in a squeak laden with good humour. ‘I like to see early risers. Caravan all right, is it?’

This seemed to short-circuit all the conventional possibilities for introducing themselves to someone they were both quite sure they’d never met. Mike shot Gally a startled look.
‘Yes, thanks,’ he said. ‘How did you know, I mean, have we, er . . .?’

She stabbed him in the ribs with a playfully violent finger. ‘Get on with you. You’re Mr and Mrs Martin. ’Course you are,’ as though they needed convincing of it.
‘I’m Mary Sparrow. Anything you want to know, don’t ask me, cos I always get it wrong.’

‘You didn’t get that wrong,’ said Gally. ‘We’re just having a look round to get our bearings.’

‘That’s right, my muffety,’ said Mary, beaming. ‘Looking’s free. You do all the looking you like and if anyone says otherwise, you say I said it was all
right.’ She pointed past the church. ‘Up there. That’s where the battle was.’

‘Battle?’ said Mike. ‘Peonnum, you mean?’

She cocked her head on one side and looked at him. ‘You do what you like on ’em,’ she said, and shrieked with laughter. ‘More like drop rocks on ’em, I expect.
Proper battle, my muffety,’ she went on when the quaking subsided. ‘Seven hundred dead there were. Vikings. That’s what I were always told, but then I expect I’ve got that
wrong too.’ She looked past him. ‘Here’s someone coming as might tell you better, though as often as not he don’t have the time of day for strangers.’

They looked round and Ferney, walking towards them with a touch of leftover stiffness, split the morning into Gally’s delight and Mike’s reserved mistrust.

‘Knows everything there is to know, roundabouts,’ said Mary Sparrow in a stage whisper. ‘And so he should at his age. Eighty something, he is.’

‘Surely not,’ said Gally and looked again at him, at ease moving through his landscape, outlined in bright morning light. His eyes were fixed on her and held her gaze.

‘Mr Miller,’ called Mary. ‘Come and meet these two. They’s new.’

‘I’ve met them already, Mrs Sparrow, thank you.’

He stopped in front of them, gave Mike an almost unnoticeable nod and addressed himself to Gally. ‘How are you this morning?’ he said and smiled.

‘Very well indeed,’ said Gally emphatically, unaccountably glad to see him.

‘Tell them about the battle,’ shrilled Mary Sparrow. ‘Don’t be wasting their time with chat. They’re busy.’

‘No we’re not,’ said Gally. ‘Really.’

‘Go on. Tell ’em about Kenny Wilkins and the seven hundred dead.’

Ferney turned on the old woman in mock rage. ‘Be off with you, Mary. You’ve got it all wrong. I’ll tell them what I like. Go and bother someone else.’

She broke into gales of high-pitched laughter and stumped off. Ferney looked at each of them in turn. The eager kindness with which he gazed at Gally faded to a guarded, closed expression when
he turned to Mike.

‘We were just looking round the village,’ said Gally. ‘Trying to get to know it a bit.’ A flicker of expression seemed to pass over Ferney’s face and she stopped.
‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, ’course I am,’ he said, rather abruptly. ‘What did that silly old woman tell you?’

‘Just that there was a battle with the Vikings behind the church. Seven hundred dead, she said.’ Gally paused and looked round at Mike, inviting him into the conversation, but he
kept his mouth shut so she went on. ‘Mike wanted to know if that was the famous battle. Peonnum or something.’

‘Well, it was a famous battle all right,’ said Ferney, ‘but not that one. Edmund Ironside and Canute’s Danes, I suppose that was the one she meant. You want to know about
Peonnum – that’s a different business. You have to go up there aways,’ he indicated the lane leading north.

Not on your life, she thought – then immediately, how silly.

A mile or more off, rising above the tops of the trees in the direction he indicated was the summit of a tall tower.

‘Is that it? Where that building is?’ asked Gally, knowing only after she’d said it that it wasn’t.

‘That’s Alfred’s Tower.’ Ferney’s tone was derisive. ‘It’s just a modern bit of nonsense. Got nothing to do with Alfred at all. You don’t go that
far. Where you want is Kenny Wilkins’ Camp.’ He was watching her closely and she felt uncomfortable again.

Mike wasn’t interested in the tower or the old man’s directions. ‘Peonnum probably didn’t happen here,’ he said loftily. ‘It was much further west. No one
believes it was here any more.’

Gally’s heart sank at the didactic superiority of his tone. It wasn’t at all what he’d said before. Ferney’s claim had clearly had a perverse effect, moving him to an
opposing view on the matter.

Ferney looked at him mildly. ‘So I’m no one, am I?’ he said. ‘And all the other people round here, they’re no one?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Mike cautiously.

‘Everyone born here knows about the battles. Handed down from father to son. Old Kenny Wilkins and all that.’

Until then Mike had been thinking that Kenny Wilkins’ Camp was perhaps some caravan site. He was suddenly struck by a preposterous thought. ‘Kenny Wilkins? You don’t mean
Cenwalch?’

‘Last few hundred years, they’ve called him Kenny Wilkins round here. Easier to remember.’

‘Look.’ Mike was almost lost for words. ‘Cenwalch fought the battle of Peonnum in 658. That’s more than thirteen hundred years ago. Are you saying we should believe
people here
remember
that?’

‘You believe what you like,’ said the old man. ‘All I’m telling you is that’s what people round here have told their children going back generations. They’ve
called him Kenny Wilkins for donkey’s years and they call that place his camp or sometimes his castle, depending on how the mood takes them.’

‘For, let’s see now, sixty generations?’ said Mike incredulously. ‘Cenwalch becomes Kenny Wilkins and that’s supposed to be evidence?’

‘So what’s
your
evidence then?’ asked Ferney, and he smiled at Gally. Gally immediately felt guilty, caught in a cross-fire, her loyalty challenged. She turned away
and began to study the parish noticeboard with seeming interest.

Mike adopted a lofty tone. ‘There’s evidence of West Saxon settlement around Exeter far too soon after 658 for the battle to have been here.’

‘What sort of evidence?’ Ferney insisted.

Mike faltered. ‘Conclusive archaeological evidence,’ he said, and it sounded lame even to him.

Ferney just smiled. ‘You go down Exeter way then and you ask around there. See if they remember Kenny Wilkins.’ He waved dismissively at Mike, turned to go off in a direction which
took him past Gally a few paces away, muttered something to her and walked off without a backward glance.

They headed back towards the house in silence for quite a while then Mike turned to Gally and said, ‘All right then. What have I done?’

‘Well,’ she said judiciously. ‘You
were
a bit snotty.’

‘Snotty?’ he said indignantly. ‘He comes up with all that nonsense and you call
me
snotty?’

‘Who says it’s nonsense? You should listen to people like that.’

‘Folk memories? If historians took folk memories seriously there wouldn’t be any history books and we’d all be making offerings to tree spirits.’

‘Double whammy,’ she said. ‘Both ways there’d be more trees left.’

It was too good a morning to argue and she suddenly felt protective towards Mike, knowing intuitively but without being able to explain it that what he felt towards Ferney was partly
jealousy.

‘Come on, professor,’ she said, ‘I’ll make you some bacon and eggs and you can look through the history books and tell me how long ago they were laid.’

They walked down the road with their arms round one another, peeping on tiptoe over the hedge as they approached the house to enjoy previously unseen views of their overgrown ruin, tucked under
the hillside.

Over breakfast, his mouth full, Mike looked up. ‘We never did ask him about the Danes and the seven hundred dead. I wonder what that’s all about.’

‘We’ll ask him next time,’ said Gally cheerfully and refilled his mug.

‘He keeps turning up, doesn’t he?’ said Mike morosely. ‘I suppose there’s bound to be a next time.’

‘It is his village.’

‘Ours too. Anyway,’ he said, putting down his knife and fork, ‘what was he mumbling to you at the end there?’

She smiled at him. ‘He said, and I quote, “Kenny Wilkins had red hair and a bloody bad temper but don’t tell your husband because he’ll never believe
it.”’

Just as a job of work can be good, cheap or fast but not more than two out of those three, so luxury and lightweight caravans don’t go together except at a forbidding
price. At the end of a long day spent measuring, planning, considering options and simply probing the masking undergrowth around the limits of their new home, Gally and Mike had been driven by a
sudden, chill gust of rain into their flimsy box. They would both have liked a bath, but the plastic cupboard that doubled as washroom and chemical loo contained only brittle, discoloured remains
of a shower system that looked unlikely to have worked even in the far-off days when it was new. Instead Gally heated soup on a gas ring, spreading a cloying warmth around the caravan, and dumped
the dirty mugs into a sink that seemed to bow a little even under their minute weight.

Now she sat upright at the table, cramped into a constriction of right angles by the severe geometry of foam rubber and plywood. The table was a wobbly wooden sheet, clipped under the end
window, which served equally inadequately as the centre section of the bed. She was drawing plans, sheets of paper spread around with ideas for the house, lists of priorities. The main picture was
the front of the house as she saw it in her mind’s eye, the ghosts of former beauty restored, windows back in place. She kept trying to draw it to her satisfaction but the front door, and
with it the symmetry of the house, stayed obstinately wrong.

She glanced over to where Mike was jammed on to the small seat next to the sink, deep in a book. It wasn’t that they hadn’t talked. Outside, they had batted their discoveries and
their thoughts back and forth, with lots of ‘Look over heres’ and ‘How abouts’. That had been male conversation, words used to exchange information, a meeting-point of sorts
– but she had a feeling that each fresh discovery brought excitement first to her, followed by assessment, whereas for Mike it was somehow the other way round. Now, inside, she wanted a
female exchange, her hopes and fears traded for his. It was what she needed to tidy up the debris of the day, especially on this day when, for once in her life, her hopes had a chance of
outnumbering her fears.

Gally hated her own neuroses, the phobias that she had never been able to confront. She had a deep, abiding gratitude to Mike that he had patiently taken them on, that when nothing else worked,
in the terrors of the night, the terrors of Boilman and Burnman, he would sit there holding her until she was calm again, never breathing a word of reproach, never showing except in his tired face
the cost to himself of her nightmares. He had even found a side way into the village which he always took, never mentioning it, so they wouldn’t have to pass the roadworks in case they
retained the power to terrify her. It was in Mike’s nature to do what he could in silence. Unless she introduced the subject of her fears he would rarely press her about any part of it. This
place
was
what she needed, she knew that, and she hoped she would be able to bring him more pleasure than she had ever done in London.

She looked at him for longer now, seeing that she was unobserved, fond and grateful but wishing suddenly that her connection to him was deeper and broader and feeling guilty as soon as she
recognized the thought. When they married she had believed that fullness would come in time. Here perhaps it would, but even as the thought came she was no longer sure. He was deep in his reading,
his own sort of mental balm, and she knew he would be just slightly irritated if she forced him out of it. She studied him in silence. He was folded round the book like a collapsed music stand, all
legs and elbows, frowning in concentration. A funny man for her – long, angular, direct, sharp as a knife, not at all the sort with whom she had ever thought she would be trying to build a
life. She had thought he might be a key to the great locked room she could feel inside her. He could sometimes help her put the experience of now into the context of then, feeding fuel to the fire
of her wish to know how the world had ticked its way to the present. Sometimes, but not always.

In the middle of her thoughts he looked up at her, sensing her gaze, and gave a little faraway smile. His hands, holding the book, moved slightly and she saw the word ‘Saxon’ in the
title. In the brief moment before he looked down again, she wrested his attention to her in the way most likely to succeed.

‘Cenwalch,’ she said. ‘I want to know more about him. Do you know anything else?’

Mike smiled, yawned and stretched. ‘That’s what I’ve been reading,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t quite sure of my facts.’ He put the book down.
‘Actually I’ve just found something else as well. It was probably here that Alfred rallied his supporters before he defeated the Danes.’

That delighted her. ‘Aha. You mean folk memories might just have something?’

‘Folk memories? Balls,’ he retorted. ‘Contemporary documented sources. Alfred’s chum Bishop Asser wrote it down at the time. In the seventh week after Easter, Alfred
gathered the surviving fighting men from the area at the Egbert Stone. Asser says it was somewhere he calls Brixton in the eastern part of Selwood Forest. There’s a stone right here that they
claim is the one.’

She was delighted. ‘I see, Pen Selwood. What does Pen mean?’

‘A clearing.’

‘So Mrs Wotsit was right about her seven hundred dead?’

‘Not that time. Alfred’s battle happened in the early summer of 878 and it wasn’t here. They marched off once he’d got his army together. The battle itself was nearly
twenty miles away, somewhere round Warminster.’

‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed, ‘no seven hundred then,’ but he was in a generous mood.