Ancient Images (31 page)

    "But you're talking about rituals that were consciously practiced," Sandy said, and trailed off: what other kind did she imagine had been repeated so often at Redfield? "Suppose there were a ritual that was forgotten over the centuries but still subconsciously remembered, and somehow that lessened its frequency," she said, just as fingers tapped on the window behind her.

    She smelled the food before she parted the curtains. The figure she glimpsed heading for the front door was delivering the takeout meal, of course. She opened the door and took the carton piled with foil containers, and he came after her, since Roger was announcing loudly that he would pay but couldn't stand up. When she saw him out she thought for a moment that a companion or a pet was waiting for him, but it must have been his shadow that dodged into the gloom between the shrubs.

    She served herself and Roger, and discovered that she was ravenous. It must only be bread that didn't taste so satisfying since she had come back from Redfield. Roger was obviously enjoying food that didn't savor of the hospital, and they let conversation lapse for a while. Eventually she said, "So did you have time to read up on Redfield?"

    "Plenty of time, but not much to read. You'd almost think it was being kept out of the history books-in fact, the librarian seemed kind of outraged that it wasn't in something called the Victoria County History. There's hardly even any references to the battle that gave the place its name." He dabbed at his mouth with a paper handkerchief and reached in his pocket. "I did copy something about that part of the country. There's no reason to suppose it was Redfield, I only wrote it down because it sounded like the kind of thing you were looking for. I'll read it to you, you'd take all night deciphering my scrawl. I didn't like to ask the librarian to photocopy it after he'd brought me so many books."

    He leafed through his notebook and squinted at a page. "I should have noted where I got this from. Some translation from Latin, some kind of study of the Roman invasion. It talks about how civilized the folk in Kent were supposed to be, then it goes on: 'Of the indigenous tribes, the most savage were reputed to be the northerners. The Britons themselves illustrated this by telling of a tribe which farmed a fertile tract of land to the north of Lincoln. Each year a human victim would be hunted through the fields and cut countless times in order that his blood (so it was believed) would strengthen the crops. This tribe was eventually slaughtered by a tribe that envied the fertility of their soil. Not satisfied with killing every man, woman, and child, the victorious northerners exhumed all the dead of that district. Having dismembered the corpses, they made a pyre of them, so high that the smoke was seen for many miles. This they did, it was reputed, so that their dead alone would feed the land…' What's wrong?"

    "That's Redfield."

    "You can't be certain of that, Sandy."

    "I
am
certain. That's exactly what the first Redfields did to the people they took the land from."

    "Huh. Well." He seemed to feel responsible for having taken her aback. "Maybe they wanted to show this tribe what it felt like to have it done to them, even if it was generations later."

    "Maybe," she said doubtfully. "Except what does it mean about their dead feeding the land?"

    "Becoming part of it, I guess. Fertilizing it, if you like. Hell, I don't know. That's what it said in English, anyway. I can't read Latin."

    "I shouldn't think that would make any difference," she said, but she could tell he still felt inadequate. She cleared away the empty containers and washed the plates. "In your condition I'm sure I wouldn't have done half so well," she told him, and snuggled against him on the sofa, walked her fingers down his stomach until he winced. "Still painful where it hurts most?"

    "Afraid so."

    "Let me know when I can take a hand in the healing process."

    "Sure, I'll tell you as soon as I'm ready for a physical."

    "Or an oral examination."

    "Right now all I can take is suggestion therapy."

    Being married must feel something like this, Sandy thought, this swapping of amiable innuendos, this sleepy contentment that made it unnecessary to put them into practice. "I guess I may take my leg to bed," Roger said eventually, and when she had pulled the quilt over him: "Stay if you want to, just as you like."

    She undressed and slipped under the quilt with him, intending only to spend a peaceful hour. She told him about her travels, about meeting people from the film and her encounter with Enoch Hill, then she dozed and thought about Redfield. Once every fifty years was less than once a generation: a generation was supposed to be thirty-three years, the length of Christ's life. Suppose the fifty-year cycle was some kind of token ritual that kept the tradition of bloodshed alive? If so, who was performing the ritual? "There he is now," Roger muttered in his sleep, and for a moment she thought the man with the carton had returned and was outside the window; she even thought she smelled stale food, or food mixed with earth. She made herself waken, and the impression faded. Giles Spence's death might have been a coincidence, she told herself, but if it hadn't been, what could she do? Prickly dissatisfaction weighed on her, and she seemed unable to crawl out from beneath it, able only to escape from it into sleep.

    She got up before dawn, and left Roger a note. The streets were deserted and silent except for a noise like wind through a dry field, which she identified as the sound of a truck brushing the curbsides. She caught a train home, where she bathed and changed her clothes, and went to work.

    She had grown so impatient with feeling she was being followed that she almost closed the doors on a news producer, one of those she'd argued with outside Boswell's office. He stared at her for the first two floors as if to ascertain from her expression if she had meant to shut him out, and then he said sarcastically, "I see your camera-shy friends have found someone else to defend them."

    "That restores my faith in humanity," she said as another floor murmured by. "Who?"

    "Some landowner up north who says they can camp on his property while they work out where they're heading, assuming they've enough brain cells left between them."

    The lift had reached his floor. Sandy had to restrain herself from grabbing his arm to stay him. "Do you happen to know what he's called?"

    "His lordship? He's called the same as his land. Your friends had better hope it doesn't live up to its name." The doors closed behind him, trapping her with his answer. "The name is Redfield."

    

    

    The lift soared up, blinking its numbers, and Sandy's thoughts sped faster. Enoch's Army mustn't go to Redfield. She had barely tasted the hostility that lay in wait there for strangers, but if anything was capable of releasing the violence that drowsed beneath the contentment of Redfield, it would be the convoy of scapegoats. Fifty years, her mind intoned like a refrain, and she wondered if the scale of the violence she foresaw could be what the land and its token bloodlettings had been waiting for. She strode out of the lift and down the corridor, into the editing room.

    Lezli was running the image of a politician's face back and forth, making him rant in the voice of a cartoon mouse. "Lezli," Sandy said, "would you feel too much under pressure if I had to go away for another few days?"

    "I'd miss you, but I quite like the pressure. Helps me grow."

    "I'm pleased for you. Don't tell anyone I asked you this, but are we still following Enoch's Army?"

    "No, we gave up on trying for an interview. We're taking film from the local networks. I believe one of the landed gentry is offering Enoch's lot a breathing space."

    "Do you happen to know when they'll get there?"

    "I can find out. I'll say it's me who wants to know." She phoned down to a newsman and told Sandy, "Looks like it should be late tomorrow afternoon."

    "So can you hold the fort here for the rest of the week?"

    "If you need me to I will. Tell me what I've been helping you with when you can, all right? You can buy the drinks."

    Sandy went up to the top floor and sat on a hard couch. Ten minutes later Emma Boswell's secretary sent her in. Boswell's nails were golden today, and flashed as Boswell flourished her hands on both sides of her face in a welcoming gesture. "Settling back in?"

    "Certainly am, though I feel I hardly need to, the way Lezli has been coming on."

    "I hear she's good, and I'm pleased you feel able to say so. Was that it?"

    "No, I wanted to ask-was Sandy made herself relax so that she wouldn't sound too eager. "I wouldn't ask if Lezli weren't doing so well, but I wonder if I could take a few days of my holidays."

    "You haven't settled into work as well as you were claiming, then."

    "It isn't that. A friend of mine was in an accident and can't get about by himself. There's a journey up north that has to be made."

    "Can't anyone else undertake it?"

    "There's only me."

    "You must be close," Boswell said, and sighed. "When are we talking about your leaving and returning?"

    "Ideally I should go today, now, if possible, and I might be away for the rest of the week."

    "Nothing in life is ideal." Boswell gazed at her for what seemed to Sandy an unnecessarily long time. "You'd better have a word with news. If they don't object to your going I don't suppose I can either, but I shouldn't like to find that you've caused any problems."

    Problems were fine so long as they could be filmed for broadcasting, Sandy amended, but they weren't the kind she intended to cause. When she told the newsroom that she needed to leave on an errand of mercy, nobody objected. She said goodbye to Lezli and hurried away.

    A placard for the
Daily
Friend
stood against the railings of Hyde Park.
ENOCH's ARMY OFFERED RESTING PLACE,
it said. Beyond it a tramp was gripping the railings and staring out at her side of the road. A trick of the sunlight as it flickered behind a rush of clouds made him seem impossibly thin, framed by altogether too few railings, and his face looked more like a lump of the park. She shivered as a shadow rushed at her, and ran into the Underground.

    Instead of going straight home she caught the train to Roger's. He'd managed to position himself at his desk, his plastered leg poking out to one side, and was leafing desultorily through a printout of a chapter. "You're back early," he said.

    "Just to see how you are and give you this." She kissed him and eventually stood up. "I've got to go back up north."

    "Only for the film, I hope."

    "I expect I'll take the chance to bring it back, but I don't know what you'll think of my reason for going." She filled a glass with water from the kitchen tap and gulped it to ease her throat, which was suddenly dry. "Enoch Hill and his tribe are on their way to Redfield at Lord Redfield's invitation."

    He crossed out a phrase and sprawled the pages facedown on his desk. "You don't think they'll be welcomed."

    "Not in a way they would want to be."

    "You're saying Lord Redfield is luring them into some kind of trap?"

    "I don't know if he means to. The sort of violence I'm afraid he may provoke wouldn't do much for the Redfield image. Maybe he thinks he can control his town, but this is one situation where I'm sure he can't. Maybe he genuinely doesn't realize what he's doing, but he should, for heaven's sake. Ignorance isn't supposed to be an excuse, especially when you've as much power as he has." She swallowed some of her harshness and said, "The bugger of it is, I feel partly responsible. I took him to task about the way his newspaper had kept after Enoch's Army, and he may even be trying to make amends."

    Roger heaved himself round in his swivel chair, his leg bumping in an arc. "But are you really saying this is happening because these fifty years are up?"

    "Roger, I don't know," she said, wishing he hadn't asked, and glanced at her watch. "I should be on my way. Let me just make a call to find out where to head for."

    The AA told her that the convoy was in the Fens, moving slowly north. With luck, though she was loath to consider how much of that she might need, she would be able to turn Enoch away from Redfield and then go on to Lincoln to retrieve the film. "I ought to thank you for helping when you didn't even know you were," she said to Roger. "I said I had to chauffeur you about, to get the time off work."

    "Sounds like what the doctor ordered. Where's the car?"

    "At my place. Wait, though, I didn't mean-was

    "But I do, Sandy. You could fit me in, couldn't you? Maybe you'd like to have some company on the road. Maybe I might even turn out to be some use."

    "You already are, and a whole lot more than that," Sandy said, and held his hands and squeezed them harder than she meant to. When he didn't wince she smiled into his eyes. "I'll go home and get the car," she said impulsively. She needn't feel selfish for letting him come with her, not when his book was at such a low ebb. Whatever the reason, she had just realized that she would rather not be alone on the road.

    They started out well. Roger loaded himself into the passenger seat and patted his outstretched leg as if it were a dog that he was pacifying. When Sandy found that the act of shifting gears rapped her knuckles on the plaster, he picked up his bundle of leg and swung it over a few inches. His crutches lay diagonally across the back seat with his coat draped over them to stop them rattling. "Here goes the last leg of the journey," Sandy said with a grin at his plaster.

    "We hope."

    She was on the Great North Road before the lunchtime traffic began to bunch where trucks were parked. As she drove past signs for Elstree and Borehamwood, Roger gave an appreciative laugh as if he had seen a small joke in a film. Soon the car was on the motorway, and then among the traffic circles of Hatfield. She remembered Harry Manners, and realized that he was the only person she had interviewed about the film who hadn't been nervous during the interview-unless his heartiness had been meant to conceal that he was.