For the Good of the State (3 page)

If Willy’s measurement of the
motte
ditch was about 500 feet in circumference, then the whole
motte-and-bailey
was a dead ringer for the Topcliffe castle in size, if not in date—obviously not in date, because Topcliffe was an early post-Conquest castle, and this was as yet not anything at all except an anonymous ‘earthwork’ on the ordnance survey map. So it just could be Ranulf of Caen’s adulterine castle, which certainly should be somewhere hereabouts if his calculations were right.

On the other hand, it was certainly not much of a
motte
, he thought doubtfully, looking up into the impenetrable undergrowth above him and trying to estimate the height of the mound. These were undoubtedly Ranulf’s lands,
de facto
, if the local bishop’s
de jure
, in the mid-twelfth century; and both Ranulf and the bishop had changed sides in the civil war, several times and not always at the same time. But the Norman barons—even a two-timing (or ten-timing) jumped-up shyster and petty hedgerow mercenary knight like Ranulf—had thrown up more impressive earthworks than this in a hundred other places, with little time and their enemies at their backs. So it still could be merely a fortified manor, a hundred years or more away from Ranulf’s brief medieval gangster flowering during the years of anarchy. So, allowing for the wear-and-tear and the wind-and-rain of all the 800 years afterwards, it all depended on Willy’s measurement, which should establish the circumference and diameter of his hypothetical
motte
, with its stockade and tower, which could perhaps be proved during his next leave—

The sound came from behind him—above and behind him, in the undergrowth which hemmed in the edge of the
bailey
ditch, at its junction with the
motte
ditch (if this really was a genuine
motte-and-bailey earthwork castle
, he thought pedantically)—and he accepted that it had to be Willy, because the
motte
ditch was all thorn-bushes and brambles, even worse than the tangle above him, from which Ranulf might once have defied the might of King Stephen (or maybe the Empress Matilda, according to which side he’d been on at the time) —

So he would have to apologize to Willy (Willy would never give him the benefit of the doubt, after that last unfortunate slip on the edge of the moat at Sulhampstead, which had not
really
been his fault—but
poor old Willy)—

But it wasn’t Willy: it was—he dropped his pencil as he stuffed the sketch-map into the back-pocket of his jeans, and automatically reached down to find it, but then stopped just as automatically in mid-fumble, half in nothing more than surprise, but then half in momentarily irrational fear, at the glimpse of a uniform.

Then the fear was subsumed by self-contemptuous irritation with himself, for letting the sight of an ordinary British policeman frighten him—not a Mister-Plod-PC-49 fatherly copper in the dear old high helmet admittedly, with red face and button nose and bicycle-clipped trousers, but a young copper in a flat cap, and no older than himself; yet a young copper who seemed just as surprised at the sight of him, and who was even now more concerned with extricating himself from the trailing bramble-sucker from last year’s blackberry growth which had snagged his uniform.

The trouble is
, he justified to himself quickly,
I have met too many other sorts of policemen, of the shoot-first and who-cares? variety, these last two years, and that’s a fact
! But the conditioned reflex was still nonetheless strong enough to make him pick up the stub of pencil slowly, and to hold it up between thumb and forefinger for inspection, complete with an ingratiating smile, as he straightened up in slow motion to match the gesture, as if to say: ‘
Don’t shoot, officer! This is just me—Tom Arkenshaw
…
And this is just my stub of pencil—not a grenade or a pistol!

But the young policeman only stamped down on the ensnaring blackberry thorns, innocently oblivious of his gestures of submission; which gave him time to come fully to his British senses, to wonder aggressively
what’s a bloody copper doing here, sneaking up on me on the edge of old Ranulf’s ditch?

One final trample. And then the young policeman sucked his finger, where a thorn had caught it, before looking down at him again. But it was a damned hostile, suspicious look all the same, thought Tom.

‘What are you after, down here?’ The policeman frowned at his finger again, and then gave it another suck.

Tom’s hackles rose. This was old Ranulf’s ditch, or near enough—not somewhere beyond the Green Line in Beirut, or a poxy Third World slum within mortar-range of a British consulate. But then he thought
maybe I’m trespassing—
? But there were no peasants in these coverts, so far south of Watford Gap, surely?

‘What—?’ Caution inclined him towards a show of ignorance, to probe the question further, before he pulled rank and privilege. But then a crunching-and-crashing sound, emanating from the floor of the ditch, away to his right, diverted the policeman’s attention.

Other sounds accompanied the crunching-and-crashing, which Tom could guess at, but which he didn’t want to interpret as he bent down to look for their source and prepare for the emergence of their author.

‘What’s that, down there?’ The policeman assumed—assumed all too correctly—that whatever Tom was ‘after’ was related to the sounds.

Tom peered uneasily into the tangle. At the very lowest point of the ditch, which was probably all of six feet higher with in-fill than when Ranulf had forced the local peasantry to dig it, there was something like a tunnel. But, although it might be sufficient for the local
fauna—
foxes for sure … and maybe even badgers, if there were still badgers unpersecuted here—it was hardly enough for Willy, surely—? Because, for one thing, it was muddy—

‘Have you seen a gentleman hereabouts?’ inquired the policeman, obviously despairing of any other answer, and not expecting it to issue from the bottom of the ditch, anyway.

It was Willy: Tom’s ear, attuned to the worst, caught a word—two words, more precisely—from the other sounds which marked Willy’s passage, exactly according to his orders, with two-yard measuring pole in hand.

Tom turned towards the policeman. Perhaps it was just as well that he had a policeman in attendance, he decided. So the important thing now was to keep the man in attendance, to protect him from physical assault.

The crashing became louder, and the words—good old Anglo-Saxon words, echoing the sentiments of the original ditch-diggers—became clearer.

‘Eh?’ He encouraged the policeman to repeat the question.

‘Have-you-seen—’ The policeman took him in with a despairing glance ‘—a-gentleman—a
-gentleman—
round-here?’

‘No,’ said Tom truthfully. ‘Why?’

The direct question, following the direct answer, was just the right one for the situation, Tom decided. Because it detained the policeman for another moment; and, if Willy didn’t arrive in a moment after that, he could always try the next question—a good late Medieval question, which had been John Ball’s question—

When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

‘You haven’t seen anyone?’ Now the poor devil was caught between the suspicion that he had an awkward customer on his hands and the final arresting vision of Willy’s emergence backwards from the thorn-and-blackberry tangle; and the adjective was strictly accurate rather than Freudian, because Willy’s designer-jeans-encased backside was without doubt a vision sufficient to divert any man from his proper duty, thought Tom.

‘Only her,’ he answered again truthfully, but this time more doubtfully, as he observed the condition of the jeans.

‘
Seventy-six—
’ She still held the measuring pole in her hand as she broke free from the tunnel ‘—
seventy-seven—
’

But that wasn’t the whole circumference of the castle mound, thought Tom quickly. He had taken the longer line of the
bailey
ditch in all innocence, not knowing about the tangle on the far side of the mound which she must have had to fight her way through, which had left him time to measure that part of the mound’s circumference which fitted into the
bailey
. So that meant 77 plus 25, multiplied by six. Which meant that Ranulf’s castle was slightly bigger than Topcliffe, but not significantly so; which might mean that Ranulf had been building under the pressure of hot civil war, where William’s man in Yorkshire eighty years earlier would have been throwing up his defences against the sullen pressure of a largely unconquered but disorganized and leaderless Anglo-Saxon population. So that evened things up. But … but, at the same time, it firmed up his theory that this couldn’t actually be Ranulf’s headquarters in Sussex. Or … if it was his HQ, then that might mean—

‘You
bastard!
’ exclaimed Willy, sitting on her heels in the mud. ‘Look what you’ve done to me!’ She surveyed herself. ‘Christ!’

The designer-jeans were certainly not what they had been before he had sent her out to measure the castle ditch. And her hair had come down at the back—and at the front, too.

‘Christ!’ She let go of the measuring pole with one hand, in order to examine the other hand. ‘I’m
goddam
hurt!’

That would be the dead blackberry suckers from last year—or maybe the thorn-bushes in the tunnel. It was much too early in the year for stinging nettles, certainly. Because there had been no stinging nettles at Sulhampstead last week, nor within the old Roman walls at Pevensey, the week before.

Willy was busy sucking her finger—

Stinging nettles were interesting, thought Tom. They were always to be found in association with agricultural activity, rather than military or monastic work—was that true or false? There had been sheep at Sulhampstead, and cows at Pevensey. Or had it been the other way round? But, either way, there might be room for some intriguing research there—

‘
Tom
!’

Tom experienced momentary irritation—he had never really thought about the incidence of
stinging nettles
before—but then he realized too late that what was expected of him was regret and guilt, and tried to contort his features appropriately. ‘Willy-love, I am
sorry —
’

‘
Bastard!
’ Her voice fell from self-pity to cold anger: she might well be remembering her experiences at Sulhampstead.

‘I said I was
sorry—
’

‘I’ll give you “sorry”!’ She picked up the measuring pole with both hands and jabbed it at him like a spear. ‘I’ll
make
you sorry—’

‘Now, Willy—don’t be like that.’ Tom skipped sideways as she jabbed at him again. He was just out of range, but she had risen to one knee and was aiming dangerously low, towards parts of him which he would undoubtedly be sorry to have injured. ‘
Willy!
’

‘Don’t you “Willy” me—’ Just as she was rising from the other mud-caked knee, pivoting on it at the same time to reach his new location, she saw the policeman on the edge of the ditch above and behind him.

The policeman cleared his throat nervously, otherwise evidently struck dumb by the intended act of Grievous Bodily Harm he had been witnessing. Or it might be just the sight of Willy herself, thought Tom with proprietorial admiration.

‘Gee!’ In the instant of recognition the wide snarl had turned to jaw-dropped surprise, but in the next instant she had rearranged her expression so that now it merely registered interest. ‘Well, hi there, officer!’

Tom’s admiration increased, and he felt that same curious twinge of an emotion he had experienced several times just recently, but hadn’t taken the trouble to explore. Or maybe didn’t want to risk exploring—was that it? he wondered, shying away from the traffic light in his mind which shone red and green at the same time.

‘Good morning … madam.’ For a moment the policeman seemed undecided as to how to address her. But that would be as much because of the rich mid-western American accent—foreigners were always tricky—as because of the contradiction between her dishevelled appearance and her abundant self-confidence, Tom estimated.

‘He’s looking for a gentleman, Willy,’ he advised her.

‘Uh-huh?’ She didn’t even look at him as she stood up, using her ex-deadly-weapon to help her. ‘Well, I guess he better go look somewhere else—’ she smiled her sweetest smile at the policeman ‘—because there’s no gentleman here.’

Tom knew then what he knew he had known from the moment the young policeman had materialized out of nowhere, which he had only been resisting because he didn’t want to know it; because, when a man was more nearly happy and carefree than he had any right to be, he also had the right to resist the inevitability of a 99-percent certainty, just in case that last one-per-cent was on his side. But he turned back towards the policeman, hating himself because he was suddenly even happier —no longer carefree, but excited now, and utterly consumed by that old addictive drug—because they wanted him this badly. And it still fed his happiness, as their eyes met, that the policeman knew too … although with nothing like that 99-per-cent certainty even now … that this unlikely gipsy-looking non-gentleman was nonetheless his
gentleman—
just his
gentleman
being awkward, no more.

The policeman struggled for five seconds against his remaining doubts, but then surrendered to the slightly higher odds. ‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw?’

Tom sympathized with him. Half his stock-in-trade was derived from the wild accidents of twentieth-century history, which had crossed unlikely genes with a different environment; and also he knew that it was always painful for such a good solid Englishman as this to throw a 350-year-old baronetcy on such a questionable product.

‘I am Sir Thomas Arkenshaw.’ As always, the foreign half of him threw down the Anglo-Norman half contemptuously: the Dzieliwskis had ridden in a hundred battles before the low-bred merchant Arkenshaws had made enough money to interest any
parvenu
Stuart King of England. ‘Yes.’