Ferney (21 page)

Gally, who would previously have turned tail, instead stepped into its path and held out her arms to stop it, but Mike caught her hand and hauled her roughly on to the verge as it tore past. She
shook herself free and turned to run after it, taking in the sight of the old man standing stock-still in its way.

Ferney didn’t even try to get clear. He was calling out to the horse as it careered, terrified, towards him and Gally, running behind it with Mike coming along in her wake, was sure he
would be knocked flat by it. The horse, however, lifted its ears when it was twenty yards from him, slowed to a brief trot, then to a walk and circled round him with its ears pricked up and its
head on one side. Gally reached him with Mike and the woman rider not far behind. Ferney nodded at her, but motioned the other two back with a sweep of his arm. ‘Whor,’ he was saying
softly, ‘whoot, whoot,’ then as the horse, panting, put its head nearer, ‘hutta, hutta, hutta.’ He stroked the horse’s flank. Gally found herself murmuring unfamiliar
sounds: ‘Prut, prut, prut.’ They went on making the noises together until the horse gave a great shuddering exhalation and seemed to relax. They continued stroking it for a minute or
two, then Ferney handed the reins to the rider, who thanked him effusively.

As the horse walked off they turned their attention to the old man.

‘That was brave,’ said Mike.

‘You had me really worried,’ said Gally sternly. ‘It could have knocked you flying.’

‘I know how to stop a horse,’ said the old man defiantly. ‘I’ve stopped enough in my time. You did pretty well.’ He lurched slightly and leaned heavily on his
stick.

‘You’ve overdone it, haven’t you? When did they let you out of hospital?’

‘This morning.’

‘This morning? And you’re dashing round the countryside stopping runaway horses? Come on, we’ll take you home.’

‘You stay here,’ Mike suggested, ‘and I’ll go back and get the car.’

He jogged off back towards the camp.

‘What was wrong with you?’ asked Gally quietly.

‘Just fading a bit.’

‘Are you better now?’

‘There’s better and better. I’ll go on fading, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. You get used to it, you know.’

‘I don’t want you to fade,’ she said simply.

He sighed. ‘Ah . . . well, there’s ways, you know.’ He nodded in the general direction of her tummy. ‘He’s waxing, I’m waning, that’s all.’

That seemed so sad that she had to divert down a different turning. ‘Those sounds,’ she said. ‘The sounds you were making to the horse.’

‘Yes?’

‘I knew them.’

‘You did. You had them right yourself.’

‘What were they?’

‘Just old horse sounds. The sort of words horses understand. From way back.’

‘How far back?’ she said. ‘From Kenny Wilkins’ time?’

He chuckled but swayed again, so that she found herself watching carefully in case he needed catching. ‘You walked through the camp, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t like it much.’ A statement, not a question.

‘It was all right, then the trees sort of . . . went away.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll tell you about that. Not now. When we’ve got time.’

‘The horse words. You didn’t say.’

‘They’re old, right enough. They were old words then, but I couldn’t say about things that happened before that.’

‘Why not?’

He found that genuinely amusing. ‘Well I wasn’t there, was I? Anyway, seems you’re not scared of horses any more. He’ll be a bit surprised, your Mike.’

‘I don’t think he ever knew I didn’t like them. You don’t get many horses in London.’

Their car came into sight soon and they put Ferney in the front passenger seat.

‘Shall we take you home?’

‘Come back and have a cup of tea,’ he said, ‘both of you.’

It was only three minutes to Ferney’s bungalow and he let Gally make the tea. Mike did what he always did in a strange house and made for the bookshelves, bridging the gap between himself
and the stranger by tossing titles across the divide. It was no charade. Ferney’s shelves were packed with history and Mike was startled by the depth of what he found.

‘You’ve got the Gimpel book.’

‘I got two of them. Which one are you looking at?’

‘
The Medieval Machine
.’

‘Oh, yes. Interesting as far as it goes.’

‘Whitelock, Thomson, Draper, Underdown,’ Mike breathed a litany of sources.

‘They scratch the surface.’

Mike was nettled. ‘They do a bit more than that, surely?’

Ferney pointed at the coffee table where that morning’s
Independent
was neatly folded. ‘You look at that. That’s history. It may be only what happened yesterday, but
it’s history. You find me anyone who was involved with any of those stories in there and they’d all have a bone to pick with it somewhere. They’d all have seen it a different
way.’

‘Fair enough, but that’s journalists for you.’

‘So what’s a historian then, if he isn’t a journalist who doesn’t have to talk to anybody?’

Gally came in with the tea. ‘You know Mike’s a historian, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Do you write books?’ said Ferney. His tone was mild, but in the context of what he’d already said, Mike sounded defensive when he replied.

‘I’m a lecturer mostly, but I have been asked to write a book.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about how agriculture changed in the ninth and tenth century.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Well you see, I think you can trace the improvements in plough design through to the fact that they started growing various sorts of beans and that improved the diet enormously. I
don’t think it’s any coincidence that you got this sudden outburst of creativity. It was the dietary effect of the legumes, the amino acids combined with the grains, you see. It really
made people able to get up and go.’

‘They were full of beans, you mean.’ Ferney said it drily, but there was a twinkle in his eye. Mike looked startled for a moment, then laughed.

‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘It’s what it means, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps that’s what you should call it,’ Gally put in, passing the cups around.

‘Not very academic,’ said Mike.

‘All the better.’

Ferney was shaking his head. ‘That might be a bit of it,’ he said, ‘but there’s another point that you might just be missing, you know.’

Mike paused with his cup raised almost to his lips and peered at Ferney over the top. His tone of voice was indulgent. ‘Come again?’

‘It was horses, really.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Changed everything, did horses. You go back to those days and all there were to pull your ploughs were oxen.’

‘And?’

‘Well,’ said Ferney as though it should be obvious. ‘Have you ever tried to get oxen to go far?’

‘No, actually.’

‘They take a long time over it. They might be strong, but they’re slow, are oxen. So back in those days, if you had fields to plough you had to live right there on top of them,
otherwise it would take you all day just to get the oxen to the field.’

Mike thought about it, flashed a conspiratorial wink at Gally that she hoped Ferney hadn’t seen and said, ‘Right,’ with the slow down and up emphasis of obvious doubt in
it.

Ferney’s tone grew sharper and Gally tightened her hands into anxious fists.

‘It meant everyone lived apart in the country, see? In scattered little hamlets because they had no choice, not until oats came along.’

‘Oats?’

‘Couldn’t keep horses over the winter until there were oats, you see. Everyone thought they were just a weed to start with, then they heard that over in other countries they grew
them for fodder and it was good for the soil, so they started planting three crops a year not two and after that they had enough oats to feed the horses through the winter.’

Mike drained his tea, thinking, then put the cup down. ‘So you’re saying the horses were better than the oxen?’ He was sounding interested despite himself.

‘Course they were. Your horse could go much further to the fields, see? That meant the farmers could move together into villages to live and still get there and back without taking all day
over it.’

Mike was shaking his head. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with tenth-century creativity?’

Ferney hooted with laughter. ‘Sex,’ he said. ‘What else? Out there in the little hamlets, they might not see anyone all year except their sister or their first cousin if they
were lucky. The old what’s it called, the old gene pool didn’t get much of a stir. Half daft, most of them, except the ones that were completely daft. Then oats came along, so they all
moved into villages and they had a much wider choice, see? It was one hell of a social life after what they’d been used to. Those genes started whizzing around all over the place.
That’s your tenth century for you. They probably needed the beans to keep their pecker up, but it’s the horse you’ve got to thank.’

Mike looked stunned. ‘Where did you read this?’ he said, seeing an unsuspected gulf opening up in his carefully plotted path to publication.

‘I’m not sure I did. It’s just something I know,’ said Ferney, and Gally knew that wouldn’t do for Mike.

He got up and went to the bookshelves again, scanning through them as though searching for an alien book, a title he didn’t recognize that might contain in it the bibliography and pedigree
of Ferney’s theory of horses. Ferney watched him.

‘Of course, I might be wrong,’ he said with an unhelpful attempt at diplomacy.

Mike wouldn’t leave it at that. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you just dream up out of the blue,’ he insisted. ‘If that’s in one of these books, I’d
really like to know about it.’

‘No, it’s definitely not in the books. Folk memory, you could call it. Common sense, I’d call it.’ He watched Mike, who was still scanning the shelves, with a touch of
amusement. ‘You’re on a bit of a hiding to nothing, aren’t you? If it’s already in a book, there’s no mileage in you writing it. If it’s not, you won’t
believe it. Go on, call it my free gift to you – a countryman’s gift.’

Mike looked at his watch. ‘Come on, Gally, time to get back if we’re going to get anything else done today.’

‘Before we go,’ she said. ‘Can I just show you the picture – if that’s all right?’ she added, turning to Ferney who nodded assent.

It seemed to mean little to Mike. He was unable to see behind the layer of dark, dirty varnish and accepted her explanation of the dim outlines of the cottage and the stone with a doubtful
expression. He was impressed by the frame, though. ‘This must have cost someone a bit,’ was all he said.

They went back and thanked Ferney for the tea.

‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ Gally said.

‘I’ll pop down and see you tomorrow maybe.’ He looked at Mike. ‘You think about what I said, now.’

In the car Mike surprised her. ‘I’ll give him his due. Assuming he’s gone through all that stuff on his shelves, he’s incredibly well-read for an amateur.’

‘So you think he knows what he’s talking about?’

‘That’s what worries me. I still think he must have read all that horse business somewhere. I’d better find out about it. If not, then I suppose he must have made it up –
like Kenny Wilkins and his red hair.’

‘Kenny Wilkins
did
have red hair,’ she said, stung, and immediately regretted it.

‘Oh, ha ha,’ he said and the moment passed.

She believes him more than me, he thought. I’m the one who’s studied. He’s just read this and that in books and half-remembered old stories. Why does she believe him? On the
other hand, at least he has read the books. Mike had found it easier to deal with the reality of Ferney than the idea. Somehow the idea, the frightening idea that sat in his head when he started to
worry, was of an ageless, powerful Ferney, a true threat. The physical reality was an old man, fresh from hospital, and all Mike’s upbringing said you had to be polite and caring towards
people like that.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘you were pretty good with that horse, too. I didn’t know you knew about horses. Where did all that prut prut stuff come from?’

The next day was the clearest of days. From the top of the hill Glastonbury Tor stood out pin sharp, almost within reach, the way it used to look so much more often. It was
reassuring for Ferney, who had wondered in recent years if his eyes were getting weaker because such days of crystal air seemed to have gone. Some rare trick of the Atlantic wind had swept
man’s burnt fuel fog away and on this day he felt that if the earth didn’t curve away under him he could see clear across the kingdom.

When his eyes were sated with the view, Ferney sat brooding on the recent past. This last lifetime held more mystery than any he could remember. He wondered how old Gally was. Somewhere in her
late twenties certainly, which meant there was a gap of thirty years unaccounted for. That gap mattered to Ferney because it held the clue to the stone and the stream, to exactly how the whole
thing worked, to what had gone wrong before and might well go wrong again. He had to accept that Gally’s return meant he might have made some wrong assumptions. It no longer all seemed quite
so certain. His mind going round in circles, he fell to thinking of how it had been before, of the roadworks, of Cochrane’s smithy and of the search that now seemed so much less urgent.

That train of thought brought him to Billy and the overwhelming mystery of that poor young man’s actions. Billy Bunter, they’d called him when he first came into the village. Got
himself taken on as a farmhand in about 1952 or ’53, was it? He was a big, simple lad who could hardly get a single word out without it tripping over his tongue. There was a touch of what
they used to call the Mongol look in his flat face, but the village people were mostly kind to him in a limited way. He’d liked to be with people. He’d just come and knock at the door,
make his noise and point at one of the empty chairs as his way of asking. A lot of people drew the line at having him inside their house like that, but Ferney didn’t mind and they’d
spent hours sitting across the fireplace from each other in mutual peace.