The Salisbury Manuscript
Read The Salisbury Manuscript Online
Authors: Philip Gooden
The Salisbury Manuscript
THE SALISBURY
MANUSCRIPT
Philip Gooden
Constable
London New York
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2008
First US edition published by SohoConstable,
an imprint of Soho Press, 2008
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com
Copyright © Philip Gooden, 2008
The right of Philip Gooden to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84529-640-7
US ISBN: 978-1-56947-5126
US Library of Congress number: 2007043758
Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd.
www.jcs-publishing.co.uk
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
The man turned aside from the farm-track as the autumn afternoon closed in and storm clouds were scudding from the west. He was glad the light was fading. Even though he’d been careful to dress in his roughest clothes so that he might be taken for an itinerant labourer, he preferred to be moving in the gloom. Nevertheless it was going to be dark sooner than he expected. He would have to move briskly.
The man had a bag slung over his shoulder and, despite weighing little, it felt awkward on his back. He set off to his right on a path which was scarcely more than a flattened line of grass on the uphill slope. When he reached a copse of beech trees, he paused to adjust the bag so it sat more comfortably. Pulling his cap down and shrugging himself more deeply inside his coat, he left the shelter of the beeches and set off at a smart pace.
Ahead of him was the bare ridge of the slope with forlorn clumps of sheep were grazing on either side. Because he was keeping his head low, the man wasn’t aware of the presence of another individual making his way in the opposite direction until he saw a pair of leather leggings and great boots almost under his nose.
He nipped off the makeshift path as the shepherd – the other man striding downhill was carrying a sheep-crook – nodded and mumbled something inaudible. The man with the bag nodded in reply. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t see the shepherd’s expression, on account of the fading light and the speed at which they passed, but he had the impression of a certain irritation, as if this hillside belonged to the shepherd. When he halted and looked back he observed that the shepherd too had stopped and was gazing uphill at him. Near the bottom of the slope the man saw what he hadn’t noticed before, the roof of a simple house, more of a hut. Meanwhile the shepherd clutched his free hand to his felt hat and, using the sheep-crook as a pivot, turned away and made towards the hut.
The man wondered why he hadn’t spotted the place before. Probably because it was in a small hollow and surrounded by bushes only now losing their leaves. He should have surveyed the surroundings more carefully. Not that it made any difference to his plan. His destination was well out of sight of the shepherd’s hut, up and over the ridge of the hill. The shepherd did not matter. The man did not intend to return to the area after this visit. He resumed the path which now crossed an extensive ditch-like depression before climbing to the top of the ridge.
At the top he paused for a final time to catch his breath and look round. The landscape stretched away to the south and west, broken by mounds and low hills and with the glint of water. No living thing was visible, apart from the sheep waiting out the rain which had begun to fall. He could still see the corner of the roof of the hut. He wondered if he was being watched even now. Telling himself that if he was genuinely what he appeared to be – a travelling workman with his tools in a bag slung over his shoulder – then the last thing he would be doing was stopping to take in the view, the man set his back to the wind and rain and walked down the lesser slope on the far side of the ridge.
He was entering on an oblong-shaped plateau, whose sides were high enough to obscure the view of the outside world. The wind slackened and it grew quieter. The hill was a natural feature of the landscape but there was a queer sort of design to the top of it. It even had a name: Todd’s Mound, though no one knew who Todd was or why his name should have been associated with the place. The man had discovered from all his reading and researches that it had first been adapted to human use many centuries ago, long before it had become Todd’s Mound. He knew that ancient people had chosen the hilltop as a secure site from which to overlook the surrounding country. They had strengthened the grassy ramparts and excavated a kind of ditch which ran almost the whole way round the base of the hill, before laying paths and constructing simple places to live and work.
At some point these people had abandoned the hilltop. Perhaps they were overrun by their enemies, perhaps it was difficult to obtain water from such chalky soil or the lowlands below became a more attractive prospect. Whatever the reason, they were long gone and forgotten. But until that point they had lived here in large numbers, and died here too. That was what interested the man. Those who had died on this fortified summit.
He walked the length of the plateau, several hundred yards. There were no trees, only shrubs and brambles. At points around the grassy rim there were small dips, even clefts, and the man was making for one of these on the south-eastern corner. Once he stopped and looked behind him, convinced that he was being followed. He was startled to see a deer shoot across an exposed area between clumps of undergrowth, a flash of brown and the white tuft of the tail showing up in the gloom. Rebuking himself for nerves, he resumed his course.
When he reached the cleft at the far edge he saw the town in the distance and the cathedral spire against the smoky clouds. He didn’t spend time on the view, which was familiar to him. The man paused to readjust his bag once more, knowing that the going would become tricky from now on because of the fall of the land on this aspect of the hill. This was why he had approached the spot via the hilltop rather than making the scramble up from the eastern side. He swung through the cleft, which was like a natural gateway into the plateau, and moved slantwise down the slope, bracing himself with his right leg and keeping his arms out for balance.
He reckoned that at some time there’d been a slippage of land at this south-eastern edge. There were areas where the grass was thin and the chalk showed through. In addition, the cleft or gateway through which he’d just passed had the appearance of having once been an entrance – a kind of back entrance perhaps – to the hilltop settlement, a function it could hardly have provided given the current lie of the land. There were trees on the slope too, a few beeches but mostly clusters of yew. The man was heading for a spot just above one of these clusters, perhaps a hundred feet or so below the top of the hill and about the same number of yards to the left of the notch in the plateau.
The point was marked by an uprooted beech tree, an old and diseased one brought down by a storm sometime in the spring of that year. The man was lucky on several counts. Lucky that this side of the hill was not used for grazing and was too steep for any other purpose, including a comfortable walk. Lucky that his researches had brought him to this general area of Todd’s Mound. Lucky that what he was searching for had until the springtime been concealed by the beech tree. Not intentionally concealed, for the tree was of a much later date. But the great trunk and the arm-like roots clinging to the hillside had effectively hidden the few yards of ground around its base from the casual glance of a passer-by strolling either at the bottom or at the top of Todd’s Mound.
This was his third expedition to the spot. The first had been discovery. The second had been for investigation and preparation. And now came the third: the fruit of his labours.
The man with the bag on his shoulder reached the fallen beech tree. Jagged shards protruded from what remained of a base which had been half torn from the soil by the violence of the fall. The great mass of the trunk and the crown with its out-flung branches, lay slantwise across the slope and provided good cover. Not that much cover was required in the growing gloom. To his left, that is on the uphill side of the tree, the man sensed rather than saw what he was looking for, a pile of mud and chalk thrown up when the tree fell. Near the centre of the mound was a darker place like the entrance to a tunnel. He experienced a tightening in his chest.
He felt his way forward in the rain until he was at a crouch and grasping a stone upright set to one side of the entrance. The stone, about four feet high, had been cut for a purpose. The work was primitive but there could be no doubt it was done by the hand of man. Resting on top of the upright was another slab of stone like the lintel to a door. The corresponding upright on the other side had fallen inwards so that the lintel was at a diagonal across the entrance. The resulting triangular aperture was small but sufficient to allow someone to worm his way inside. After his most recent expedition the man had made a rudimentary attempt to hide the spot by dragging across a severed tree branch so that it partially blocked the opening. Now he tugged at it with both hands and hefted it down the slope.
The man eased off his bag and placed it by the aperture. He glanced uphill for a last time. Seen from this crouching position, the sheer bulk of Todd’s Mound seemed about to tumble down and bury him and he felt, as well as excitement, a tremor of fear. He shrugged the feeling off and pushed the bag ahead of him into the narrow entrance.
He had to crawl to make his way to the interior but, once there, the space grew bigger and he was able to kneel. His head was brushing against the low roof. There was the smell of damp and leaf-mould, and something more rank underlying it. It was pitch dark. The man unfastened his bag and brought out an oil lamp which he placed carefully between his spread knees. He took a box of matches from his coat pocket and, working by touch, struck a light. The acridity from the match filled the tiny space.
When the lamp was going the man spent some time adjusting the wick until he was satisfied with the quantity of light. The light was a warm gold. Like the smell of the match, it was oddly comforting. He squatted on his haunches and raised the oil lamp to examine the interior of the cave as if for the first time. Really, he was making sure that no one had penetrated this secret space since his last visit. The fact that the tree branch outside the entrance hadn’t been disturbed was not conclusive enough for him. He was a careful man who took precautions. And what he saw now did not reassure him.
The light from the lamp showed that this space, burrowed into the side of Todd’s Mound, extended for about two dozen feet at right angles from the little entrance. There were pale objects piled at the end, far enough away for the lamplight not to reach fully. The tunnel-like space was wider than it was high and the roof of rock and chalky soil sloped down towards the end. If this place had once been a natural cave or fissure in the hillside, it had been enlarged and reinforced at the sides with thin slabs of stone. These stones, like the ones around the entrance, bore man-made marks.
On his second visit the man had taken some of the bones which were among the items he had discovered at the other end of the burrow. When he first picked up the bones he experienced a momentary unease. Yet he told himself,
he
won’t mind, he’s out of it now. Or was it a
she
, not a he? But he thought not. The bones seemed too large to be a woman’s, and he was a good judge of such things. So he had placed them in a deliberate pattern a couple of yards inside the opening. The bones – shinbones and a forearm from a human skeleton – were greasy and unpleasant to the touch. Even so, handling them did not trouble him. He wanted another small guarantee that no one would disturb the burrow, ‘his’ burrow as he considered it.
Accordingly the man spent some time thinking of a pattern to put the bones into, a pattern that would look arbitrary but have meaning for him. He remembered the private smile he’d given as he positioned the bones in the form of an H, the initial of one of his names. It looked like an accidental arrangement yet anyone stumbling across the hidden place and worming his way into the interior could hardly avoid disturbing these carefully placed remains.
By the light of the lamp the man saw, with a thrill of fear, that that was what had happened. The shinbones which formed the uprights of the H, together with the ulna that made the cross-piece, had not merely been disturbed. They had been scattered. They were lying to one side of the burrow as though they’d been impatiently tossed there. By a human intruder? By someone trespassing on
his
burrow? The man suppressed an instinctive urge to douse his lamp as if he was being watched at that very instant, and examined the area around where he’d placed the bones.
But the ground was a mess of mud and chalk and fragments of root. There were no discernible human marks. He simply couldn’t tell whether anyone else had blundered into this place. The man realized that his little precautions didn’t amount to much. He recalled the shepherd striding down the hill on the far side of Todd’s Mound. Was it possible that the shepherd or some other country fellow had gone poking into his burrow and pushed aside the bones which had been positioned in the shape of a letter? Had this other person found . . . what there was to be found at the far end?
There was only one way to make sure of course. To go and see. Yet the man did not move. He stayed on his haunches, surveying the space by the light of the lamp. His breath came short and fast. He heard the beating of his heart mingled with the hiss of the oil lamp. The burrow seemed to close in round him. He made a conscious effort to calm himself. When his heart slowed and his breath eased, he listened hard. The wind moaned outside and he was startled by a movement in the corner of his eye. Something small, something grey and scuttling, which disappeared into a fissure in the flank of the burrow. That was the explanation for the moving bones, no doubt. A mouse, a rat, some earth creature, had disturbed the bones. Yet the man was not altogether convinced by his own explanation.
Anyway there was nothing to be done except to get on with the job. He’d be making his way back in the darkness. Too late, he cursed his caution in not working by daylight. Carrying his burden away by night, he risked a broken leg or worse. Even so, he couldn’t avoid the thought that there was a certain appropriateness to doing all this under the cover of night. A moonless night too. He brought a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap. He took a good swig of brandy. Its warmth reached down inside him. He stroked the flask as if in gratitude, mechanically running his fingertips over the initials incised into the surface.
Fortified, he took up his bag and the oil lamp and, with back bent, shuffled awkwardly on his knees towards the further end of the burrow. There was a collection of bones up here, including a skull and the arch of a ribcage. The skull was resting against a rock. The man himself had put it in that position. Fortunately, it remained as he had left it, lolling like a head against a pillow. The skull grinned at him, as if it knew some secret. There was a hole in one side of the head although the man couldn’t tell whether it was as a result of a wound inflicted before death – if so, certainly a fatal one – or whether it had been produced by the manner of his burial or even later. It was likely that this individual had died by violence or perhaps been sacrificed in some ancient, barbaric rite.