Beneath the Soil (2 page)

They left the Angel after an enjoyable lunch. Millie had said nothing about dieting, and tucked into fish and chips with gusto.

‘What now?' Nick asked. ‘Is this farm near enough to ditch the car and walk?'

Suzie consulted the map, measuring half miles with her thumb joint. ‘Probably not. Saddlers Wood is off the road that goes south out of Moortown. It looks a bit remote. Right at the parish boundary.'

The car took them down the narrow country road. Suzie leaned forward, scanning the fields and woods on the left-hand side.

‘There!' she cried. ‘You've passed it.'

Nick brought the car to a halt. He reversed to where a cart track led uphill between bramble-grown hedges. A weathered board at the roadside read: Saddlers Wood.

Tom got out of the car. ‘I can't see a thing. You say somebody lives up there?'

Some way up the track, the open fields ended. Woods rolled down from the ridge to meet them. The summer foliage was dense with many shades of green.

‘Do you want me to drive up the track?' Nick asked.

Suzie hesitated. ‘I'm not sure. It's not very welcoming, is it? Not even a surfaced drive. Maybe we'll walk. We'll get more of a feel of the place that way. I'm sure it's the way Richard and Charlotte would have come and gone.'

‘Yes, like, I can imagine her having to walk all the way into Moortown to do her shopping,' Millie said. ‘And I don't suppose she was much older than me.'

‘As a matter of fact,' Suzie said, ‘farm girls didn't usually marry young. That was more the upper-class girls, who could afford servants to do the heavy work. Twenty-three was actually a typical age for a young woman to get married. She needed to be fully grown and tough to do her share of the farm work and have half a dozen kids as well.'

They started to walk.

‘Lucky there's been no rain for a week,' Nick said, as he negotiated the deep, hard ruts of tractor tyres. ‘This will be thick with mud in the winter.'

‘If Richard and Charlotte lived here, they'll have been used to walking through mud.'

‘They'll have a Land Rover nowadays,' Tom said.

‘More importantly, there won't
be
any farm labourers,' Suzie told them as they climbed higher. ‘They're a dying breed. It's a big social problem. Farmers these days are working on their own. No one to talk to. Not even the cows and horses there used to be. Their children don't want to stay on the land. And then all the worry of prices not keeping up with costs. There's a real risk of suicide.'

‘Cheerful,' said Millie. ‘Not exactly your rural idyll.'

As if in answer to their thoughts, a gunshot rang out across the hillside.

T
hey froze. Tom was the first to laugh.

‘As you were. Somebody's shooting pheasants.'

‘It's July. It's not the pheasant season,' Suzie said.

‘Rabbits, then.'

Suzie relaxed. Tom was right, of course. Shotguns were part of the way of life on a farm. It had just been a startling coincidence that they were talking about the suicide risk for farmers just when that gunshot had shattered the rural peace.

They walked on. They were nearing the edge of the woods. Still there was no sign of human habitation up ahead.

The tree covering closed over them. Their feet sank deeper in the litter of last year's leaves. Suzie began to think she could see a clearing near the brow of the hill.

‘How much further?' asked Millie. ‘You didn't tell me we were going mountaineering.'

‘Nearly there,' Nick said. ‘I hope.'

From a narrow path at the side of the track, a man came stumbling hastily. He wore a shapeless green waxed jacket that had seen better days, over muddy brown trousers. His fairish hair looked dishevelled. He was about Nick's age.

But what caught the eyes of the Fewings family was the shotgun clenched in his hand.

He looked startled when he saw them and stopped dead on the path. Though his lean, tightly drawn face was turned towards them, Suzie had the feeling that he hardly saw them.

The Fewings were forced to stop too. They could hardly walk straight past him.

Nick took charge of the situation.

‘Hi, there. Are you from Saddlers Wood Barton? I hope we're not trespassing. Just out on a family history quest.'

‘My great-great-grandparents,' Suzie supplied. ‘Back in the 1850s. They lived here. Well, maybe not at the farm itself. Richard was an agricultural labourer. But we thought maybe there might be a cottage. Somewhere where a farm employee might live?'

The man looked at them blankly. Suzie wondered if he had taken in what they had said.

At last a long shudder ran through him. He seemed to relax a little. He looked down at the shotgun he was holding, almost in surprise. Then he broke it and folded it over his arm.

‘Philip Caseley.'

He held out an awkward hand, saw the earth on it and thought better of it. Suzie scolded herself for the start of surprise that there was no blood on it. Farmers were no strangers to dirt and blood.

‘Yes, I farm up at Saddlers Wood. For now. My family's been there for generations. And likely as not I'll be the last.'

Suzie wanted to ask him why, but it seemed too intrusive. Nick evidently thought so too.

They stood indecisively. Philip Caseley had made no attempt to answer Suzie's question.

It was Tom who took the initiative. ‘Is it OK if we go on? Take a look around? My mother's a family history nut. Likes to ferret out where they lived, so she can get the whole picture.'

‘Yes,' Suzie found her voice. ‘Richard Day was a pivotal generation in our family. Before him, they'd been agricultural labourers or husbandmen for centuries, in a fairly small area around here. But he was the one who upped sticks and moved off to the city, or a village on the edge of it. He still worked as a farm labourer at first, but soon he was down at the dockyard, labouring there. Suddenly, we were an urban family. That part of the nineteenth century was a hard time for farming.'

‘Like now.' There was bitterness in the brief reply.

‘So. It's OK?' Tom turned on his most winning smile.

The man stood back a pace. ‘My wife's up at the farm,' he said shortly. ‘You can ask her.'

Abruptly, he strode across the track in front of them and disappeared along the path on the other side into the wood.

The Fewings looked at each other.

‘Rabbits, did you say?' Millie's voice was high with tension. ‘I don't know what he was shooting at, but I don't see why a rabbit should get him that upset.'

‘Still.' Tom shrugged. ‘We've got the go-ahead. Lead on, Mum.'

Suzie had been right about the clearing. In only a few steps, the view opened out. The farm was sited just under the brow of the hill. Just low enough to be sheltered from the northerly winds, Suzie reflected. The farmhouse and its barns made an L-shape around the yard, with an old covered well in one corner. The cob walls, on their stone base, had been whitewashed, but here and there the raw red earth showed through on the barn. The house was in rather better trim, but the window frames had not been painted for years. The black paint was peeling. Moss grew thick on the battered thatch.

‘There's no sign of life,' Suzie said.

No chickens scratched in the yard. There was no contented moan of cows. No one was at work out of doors.

Her words came back to her with an ominous echo she had not intended.

‘Oh, come on, then!' Millie stalked up to the front door, elegantly casual in her jeans and ankle boots. She rapped the heavy knocker.

There was a moment's silence. Then a dog barked frantically. Simultaneously, a door Suzie had not noticed opened at the end of the long building. A woman in a floral wrap-around apron came out, overtaken by a noisy black-and-white collie. She was smaller than Millie. Her pale hair straggled around her shoulders in limp curls, a sad contrast to Millie's white-blonde haircut, yet beneath the apron, her silk shirt and linen skirt looked unexpectedly stylish for this rural setting. Her thin face looked scared.

‘Yes?' Her greyish eyes were round with questions.

Suzie felt a sudden desire to protect and comfort her. She stepped forward impulsively. The collie ran forward, barking.

‘Mrs Caseley? We met your husband back in the wood.' She could not help but see how the woman started back. ‘He said it was all right for us to come on up here and ask you where my great-great-grandparents might have lived in the 1850s. It was in the census that Richard Day was a labourer on the farm here. The address was “Cottage, Saddlers Wood”.'

She felt the incongruity of what she was asking. It must seem so remote, so trivial, to whatever this frightened woman in front of her was undergoing. Suzie could not help but think, as she knew all the family must be thinking, of that distraught man who had burst out of the trees clutching a recently fired shotgun in his hand.

The collie quietened under Millie's stroking hand.

Mrs Caseley struggled to get control of herself. She even managed a pale smile.

‘You'd better come in, then.'

Suzie met Nick's eyes questioningly.

‘If that's all right? We don't want to be a nuisance if it's a bad time.'

But Mrs Caseley had turned her back and was walking towards the half-open door. The Fewings looked at each other and followed.

The kitchen was darker than Suzie had expected. A black Rayburn took up most of one wall. The central table and work surfaces were cluttered with unwashed crockery and pans. Mrs Caseley pushed back her hair from her eyes with a weary hand.

‘You'll have to excuse it. I'm behind with things today.'

Why? Suzie wondered.

‘Not at all,' she said hastily. ‘We should have rung up to ask if we could come. It wasn't fair to spring ourselves upon you like this.'

Two steps led up into a living room. Suzie had expected to find it stuffed with old furniture, handed down through the generations. But it was sparsely furnished, and what there was looked cheap and modern. With a flash of insight, she wondered how much of the older stuff might have been sold off to pay bills. Probably what used to be here would have acquired antique status, snapped up to furnish the cottages and converted barns that people with higher incomes bought as second homes.

A sadness came over her as she looked around her. A way of life was dying. The county where her own ancestors had lived and worked for so long was being taken over by incomers, who thought of it only as picture-postcard prettiness, or a series of quaint photographs in a calendar they would send to relatives back in the city.

The others had fallen quiet.

‘Sit yourselves down,' Mrs Caseley told them, with an effort at hospitality. ‘I'll make you some tea.'

‘No, really,' Suzie protested. ‘You don't need to bother. We only wanted to ask you whether there are any cottages on the farm. Somewhere a married labourer might have lived and brought up his family.'

But Mrs Caseley was already retreating into the kitchen.

The Fewings sat on the hard-cushioned furniture looking at each other in some embarrassment.

Suzie whispered to the children, ‘If she offers you something to eat, say no, thank you.'

The picture was running through her mind of Philip Caseley, agitated, with the gun in his hand. How strained was this marriage, the two of them all alone up here, with money tight?

She need not have worried. Mrs Caseley came back with a tray set with flowered cups and saucers of strong tea. Suzie was relieved to see that she hadn't opened a packet of biscuits in their honour.

She had thought that the woman hadn't heard her question as she left the room, but the farmer's wife said as she set down the tray, ‘Well, no. I can't say as there are any cottages standing on the farm. If there were, I've no doubt Phil would have had them done up and sold them off. Lord knows we need the money. But there are some broken-down walls back in the woods. Cob needs to keep its hat and boots on. If you don't put a roof on it and keep it out of the wet, it'll sink back into the earth it was got from.'

Suzie felt a thrill of excitement. The ruins of a cottage might not look much now, but she knew if she saw it, her imagination could supply the picture of what it had once been. She would be able to see Richard setting out to work on the farm in the early morning; Charlotte in her apron, feeding the chickens, making butter, scrubbing floors. And the children. How many of them were there? Six, she thought, before they packed up their belongings and took the long journey down to the coast and the dockyard town.

She jerked back to the present.

‘Where can we find these ruins?' Nick was saying. ‘Is it OK if we go looking in the woods? Your husband had been out shooting when we met him. We wouldn't want to get mistaken for a fox, or whatever it was he was after.'

The spoon rattled against the cup Mrs Caseley was handing to Millie.

‘You heard that, did you?' There was a moment of silence. ‘No. You've nothing to worry about. Go back down the track until you see a smaller path going off to your left. It'll be a couple of hundred yards down there. I hope you're not wearing your best clothes. Likely as not it'll be grown over with brambles. Phil and me, we've not much call to go down there.'

‘Do you come from Moortown yourself?' Suzie asked. ‘I've got quite a few ancestors there. We might be related.'

‘I was Eileen Taverner before I was married. On my mother's side it was the Hutchings. I can't say as I know much about them before Granddad and Granny Hutchings. They kept a greengrocer's shop. How far back they went, I couldn't tell you.'

‘I've got Taverners on my family tree! Charlotte Day's father was a Taverner. He was a stonemason, out near the tollgate on the east road.'

She had hoped Eileen Caseley might react with enthusiasm, and they could have enjoyed speculating about how close their relationship really was. But the woman's pale, tired face showed no reaction. The fear all the Fewings had sensed in the farmyard had faded, leaving a dull apathy. Suzie shivered. How nearly might this have been her own experience?