At very much the time that Meriel was first giving serious thought to the paragon of masculine beauty she’d one day marry, a young Englishman who measured up to her requirements in terms of fair-haired Saxon bulk, was opening his blue but bleary eyes on a new day.
Ned Ashby lay in the drowsy darkness of his bedroom, listening to the sounds of an English winter morning and struggling to rid himself of the soft golden flesh of his dream. He must get up. The clock on the front stairs had just struck six. Its familiar chimes cut through the gurgle of the water pipes and the gusty sighs of wind outside. Down in the farmyard a couple of Maran cocks were crowing with monotonous persistence; and in the eaves above his window the sparrows were beginning their first arguments of the day. ‘Chavishing,’ his grandmother called it. To Ned’s ears it was all as much a part of The Bury as the musty smell of his bedroom rug, of the smooth texture of the linen pillow case beneath his head – and of his own tumescent state.
‘Gold, pure gold,’ That’s how the man described her, and in his persistent dreams Ned had transferred the gold to the smooth curves and shadows of a female body. To put it simply, he was young and fit and ready for a woman. He felt the need pulse through him like a current; and although he’d yet to find his golden succubus, he’d come across a man who made him desperate to do so.
He’d met him in the saloon bar of the Lord John Russell public house in London, one foggy evening the previous November. Ned and some other university freshers were in the habit of eating there on Saturdays, while their landladies made the most of a night at the Music Hall – although that evening he’d sat alone, eating his one-and-sixpenny supper from a high stool at the counter and trying not to court attention. He saw the man the moment he came in; a gentleman in tailcoat and striped trousers – tall, dark, and somehow predatory with glittering black eyes. Ned watched him furtively between mouthfuls of beef.
There was a crow sat on a tree
And he was black as black could be…
The crow leant back against the wall at the far end of the bar, with his high silk hat on the tin counter at his elbow, a double-whisky in his hand. He caught Ned’s eye the next time he looked up, and raised his glass.
‘Wondering what I’m doin’ here, young fellow?’ he enquired in an embarrassingly familiar manner. ‘Feeling envious of my fine feathers, are we?’ And since it was exactly what he had been doing, Ned choked on a potato to remove all doubt. For one so obviously inebriated, the dark man acted swiftly, stepping up to strike Ned hard between the shoulder blades, then forcing him to take a man-sized gulp of his own neat scotch. The spirit scalded his already bruised throat, and while Ned wiped his streaming eyes the stranger ordered two more whiskies.
‘Shall I tell you something to surprise you, boy?’ he said as if nothing had happened. ‘D’ye know I’m jealous of you? Yes, jealous of your youth and your damned innocence! How old are you; eighteen?’
‘I’m twenty, almost twenty-one,’
‘Twenty, almost twenty-one? I’d already fucked a son into this world by your age, boy,’ the other said obscenely. ‘’Though not entirely out of choice, mind,’ he added, swaying forward until their faces almost touched and Ned could smell the whisky on his breath. Close-to, his eyes were a deep brown – as sad as all dark eyes appear when they aren’t smiling.
‘Canada, Peru… year in Borneo, ten in Queensland, money, houses, women…’ he intoned, searching an inside pocket for a card-case and fumbling a calling card left-handedly onto the counter. ‘But what’s it brought me, eh boy?’ The card said: Robert Llewellen, B.Sc., Consultant: Mining and Civil Engineering, and provided two addresses; one in New Broad Street, London, the other in Queensland, Australia.
‘I’ll tell you – tell ye what it’s brought me; the devotion of a woman I despise and the contempt of one I care for.’ He smiled lopsidedly beneath his black moustache; and then to Ned’s alarm, set down his glass to place a large hand squarely on the cashmere crotch of his striped trousers and pat it with affection.
‘Oh yes indeed; makes fools of all of us, this gentleman’s-gentleman of ours,’ he said in ringing tones. ‘You’ll find out for yourself, boy – this is the sceptre that commands us! They understand that in the East all right, by George they do!’
The time had clearly come to leave. Ned pushed his stool back from the counter. But as he did so, the man’s hand shot out from its awkward resting place to catch him by the sleeve. ‘Went to see her, went today,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Walked all the way, all through the fog – stood on her doorstep like some bashful swain. But wasn’t brave enough to knock… Couldn’t knock, you see. I funked it.’
It wouldn’t have been all that hard for Ned to shake him off; and no doubt he should have done to spare himself the image of that teasing golden woman. But something made him want to hear the rest of it. Perhaps an instinct for his future. Or maybe it was just the whisky!
‘The woman who you care for?’ he asked, settling back onto his stool to toy with the congealing remnants of his supper. ‘Was it her you went to see?’
The other man was silent for a moment, and when Ned looked up he saw that he was smiling. ‘Aha!’ Llewellen gave a drunken chuckle ‘I’ve caught the fellow’s interest then – and now he wants to hear what she was like in bed, and what she’s had to do with wicked men like me.’
‘Not at all, that isn’t what I meant,’ Ned mumbled, feeling the blood rising to his hairline, and wondering miserably if there was anyone within six yards of them in either bar who hadn’t heard the entire conversation.
‘She’s gold – pure gold, that woman; that’s all I have to say.’ And disappointingly, it had been all he did say on the subject; ’though as he spoke, Llewellen reached across to where his calling card lay face-upwards on the counter; flicked it over and scrawled something on the back with an expensive fountain pen.
‘Find out for yourself, why don’t you?’ he recommended, tucking the card into the breast pocket of Ned’s Norfolk jacket. ‘Oblige us both by calling on the lady. See what she makes of that pink face and unstained character of yours. Help her to forget me if you can.’
Ned still had the card, with Llewellen’s name on one side and on the other the address that had plagued him ever since.
In the meantime there were forty wether lambs to move this side of breakfast; and with a manful heave Ned freed himself of bedclothes and golden succubi to light his bedside candle. Shivering, he dressed as fast as possible, cursing his collar stud and necktie and the buttons of his waistcoat, and ignoring the blond tangles of his hair.
The light from his candle stirred the shadows of the old Sussex farmhouse as he crept out onto the landing. A clock ticked hollowly and the uncarpeted back stairs creaked beneath his weight. The passage from their foot ran past the pantry to the closed door of the big kitchen. A thin strip of yellow lamplight showed beneath it, and from the murmuring drone on the far side Ned knew its occupants must by now be well into their first pot of tea.
As he opened the door, the brilliant warmth of the kitchen engulfed him in an atmosphere that spoke louder to him of his childhood than anything that he could think of. It smelt of soup stock, tea leaves and dripping pans, lamp oil, tile polish and burning coke; and in that first delicious whiff he felt the years roll backwards in a succession of jammy treats and supervised tummy-glides through the hatchway, from Nanny to Father and back again – black beetle races, hucklebones and cod’s-eye marbles on the flags, vast Christmas teas for the village children, daring raids on the pantry with his sister Helen, and Cook’s celebrated homily: ‘No picken’ an’ stealin’ Master Edwin, an’ this time I means it!’
Cook herself sat at the big pine table, with Bridget and the new tweeny one on either side of her and the brown teapot handy. Her name was Betsy Ann Tinsley and she was really a cook-housekeeper. But nobody for as long as Ned could remember had called her anything but ‘Cook’. She’d been at The Bury forever, and must have been quite young when he’d first known her. But in his memory she’d always been exactly as she was now; stout and well-upholstered in lilac print and an old plaid cross-over, with smoothly plaited hair and a complexion as clean scrubbed as her own back kitchen drainer.
‘Marnin’ Master ‘Assock-’Ead!’ she sang out as soon as he appeared in the doorway. ‘Cuppa tay then is it?’
Twenty minutes later he was still there at her table, dividing his attention between an uncooperative gaiter strap and Cook’s own confident pronouncements. ‘Oh glory yes,’ she was saying, ‘Nanny’ll be back for that ol’ job of ’ers surely, soonasever you get crackin’ an’ start a brood of yer own, Master Edwin.’
‘I bet she won’t,’ Ned retorted, busy with his gaiter and wondering why the hell he had to blush so readily. ‘You know she always said that Helen and I were more than flesh and blood could stand.’
‘Blow that, kiddy. Course she’ll be back. She said as much in ’er last letter, didn’t she?’ said Cook, now settled to a favourite theme. ‘An’ we all know as ’ow poor Missus Walter ’ud want to see you settled. God bless ’er, the poor dear.’
Ned made a face. Everyone always called his mother ‘poor Mrs Walter’ or ‘poor dear Lillian’ because she’d died before her thirtieth birthday. Indeed ‘poor’ had become so much a part of her character that he pictured her as permanently sorrowful; an idea that the two poker-faced photos of her in his Grannie’s sitting room had only tended to confirm.
‘An’ if ye’re thinkin’ ye’re too green for such things,’ Cook continued relentlessly, ‘I’ll tell ye boy, my ol’ Alf was no more’n nineteen when we were wed. An’ there are some as say that ’e wus past ’is best deeds then.’
Ned caught the wink that she gave Bridget as he rose to leave. ‘Well then, you and Nanny and the rest will just have to wait then, won’t you,’ he told them from the kitchen door. ‘Because I don’t intend to marry, not for years!’
It was no longer dark outside. There was a sharp earthy tang in the air without a touch of frost. Somewhere in the wood above the house the rusty ratchet call of a cock pheasant was competing with the farmyard roosters. But the wind had dropped and the topmost branches of the beeches barely stirred. Bess was ready and waiting for him in her run behind the old brew-house, and as soon as Ned released her circled joyfully around him; tail pluming, eyes intent upon her master’s face.
The male wether lambs were grazing the Brooks Laine away below the furthermost farm buildings; and as they walked down to them through the rutted yards Ned automatically glanced back at the house.
The main body of the existing Bury farmhouse had been plainly built of brick and pitcher-flint by Ned’s ancestor, Charlie Ashby, in the reign of Queen Anne. But it wasn’t until Ned himself was almost seven that his grandmother had persuaded the estate trustees to modernise and extend the place to a plan of her own. Inside she’d divided some rooms and enlarged others, installed an elaborate plumbing system to include a proper bathroom, two inside lavatories and a monstrous clothes-drying cabinet; and at the centre of it all made space for a big, gloomy, mock-Elizabethan hall and operatic staircase built of oak. Outside, she had not only added a heated conservatory, a porch and a studded oak front door, but had extended the mock-Tudor theme into a whimsical façade as lavishly half-timbered as anything in a Grimm’s fairy tale.
One way or another, the rebuilt house was something of a sham to Ned’s way of thinking, just like his Grannie. No amount of corsetting or London education could hide Margaret Ashby’s stubborn Sussex breeding – and looking back at its pretentious frontage, Ned felt much the same about the house. For all its architectural fraudulence, the true spirit of The Bury was obvious from its proud position in the valley, and the working farm it overlooked.
In the centre of its buildings, like the keep of an old castle, stood the great aisled barn; flint-built with crop-eared gables and grey slates. In times gone by, its doors had opened to long cavalcades of laden waggons; to horse and oxen teams and red-faced men of Sussex – to loads of corn sheaves, woollen fleeces, fertiliser, mangles and potatoes. Its ancient beams had echoed to the roar of the steam thresher, and before that to the thump and rattle of hand flails; the shouts of men long dead. It had witnessed bacchanalian harvest suppers in the good old days when most of Sellington worked on the farm – and above its cobwebbed rafters had reared generations of stock doves and sparrows, and swallows from South Africa who’d faithfully returned to it each year for more than two centuries.
On either side of the great barn, to north and to south, the valley held a rambling complex of flint buildings and barton-yards, each with its allotted purpose. The shearing yard was closest to the village at the northern end. Then came the stables with the granary and cart-lodge – and on a level with the path up to the house, the cowshed and dairy.
The lights just now were on in both.
‘Now that lit’le tin soldier ‘e sobbed an’ ‘e sighed, so I patted ’is lit’le tin ’ead.’ The deep voice was Danny Goodworth’s. “What vexes yer lit’le tin soul?” sez I, an’ this is what ‘e said…’ The morning milking was in progress.
Behind the dairy and the barn, a long shed with fattening pens housed Gran’s small herd of pedigree Red Sussex cattle. Beyond that were rick-yards, maxons, pigscots, fowlhouses and a duckpond – a slaughterhouse and bullpen, a workshop with a grindstone, and the dig-yard where the ewes came in for lambing.
When Ned had climbed the dig-yard gate and Bess had wriggled underneath it, they had a clear view down the valley to the sea. In the foreground, in the middle of a half-eaten field of kale that smelt powerfully of cabbage, a flock of five hundred or more ewes and tegs were kept together by two circling dogs, while the shepherd and his boy re-pitched their fold on a fresh patch of kale. It was an ancient process, repeated daily summer and winter throughout the year. Every day the sheep were taken from the fold to graze the downs above the valley, and every night returned to a new fold – on kale, mustard, rape or rye, on trefoil, tares or hay-stubble, depending on the season. The folds gave the sheep the extra nourishment they needed, and in return they fertilised the spare chalky soil.
‘Morning Bat! Morning Jemmy,’ Ned called out to the pair; vaulting the gate to cross the kale stalks to them. They both looked up to nod gravely at him and chorus ‘Marnin’, Mus Ned!’ in unison.
‘Not a bad sort of day?’ Ned ventured as he lifted an oak wattle and held it to its neighbour for the pitch-bar. The old shepherd awarded him a brief glance from beneath the brim of his weather-painted felt hat. Bartholomew Vine seldom looked you in the eye in any conversation more than once. It made him feel uneasy and it wasted time.
‘Onnatural mild an’ muggy if y’asks me, Mus Ned,’ he said to the pitch-bar as he drove it home.
‘Now then, ye’d better watch that dry flock o’yourn for pneumony, lad, soon-as-ever it turns round to rain.’ And Ned was struck with the absurdity of a situation in which The Bury workers conspired to train him to be good enough eventually to give them orders. Of course it wasn’t his dry flock. He was expected only to ‘looker’ the wethers for the time that he was down from university. Bat Vine would fatten them off, grade them, trim them, mark them up and drive them into Lewes to be sold. But they’d be known as ‘Mus Ned’s lambs’ all the same: and it would be he, not Bat, who’d be congratulated for the good price that they’d.
‘Lookin’ good, they wathers,’ the shepherd now remarked with an encouraging nod in their direction. ‘Reg’lar credit to you, Mus Ned, I reckon.’
And they did look good; that at least was true; deep-chested and level-backed in the best traditions of the Southdown breed that Great-Grandfather Ashby had helped improve.
Bess pressed herself against Ned’s legs while he unlatched the gate into the Brooks Laine, trembling with the effort of her self-control. The lambs watched her fixedly with slowly rotating jaws, then bounded off at her first move; stiff-legged like woolly rocking horses. But the dog knew her business, and had them flanked and wheeling back towards the gate before Ned was quarter-way across the field. At the entrance of the old wapple-way up through the wood, the wethers stood uncertainly, facing outwards, then circled, coughing nervously, as Ned walked up and Bess crept forward with her belly to the earth.
‘Slow an’ steady.’ That’s what Bat advised, and how it worked. With some gentle hissing and shushing from Ned and two or three darting side-runs from Bess, the sheer pressure of bodies eventually forced the first lamb through into the wood. Then suddenly as if a dam had burst the little flock tore harum-scarum up the wapple – leaving nothing more for Ned to do than follow on and shut the gate into the Wood Croft field behind them.
With time in hand before the breakfast bell, Ned decided to walk Bess on through the beech wood to the top. From the higher field gate, a path wound up through the trees and rhododendron shrubberies behind the house to a small grassy mound, with perched upon it something which from below looked not unlike a giant mushroom.
No one knew who’d made the Bury Mound originally, or why – although it was marked on an old map of the area, which suggested that the farm was named for it. Its more recent function on the other hand was well accepted, with at least three generations of the Ashbys using it for family proposals; to which end Margaret Ashby had replaced the delapidated wooden arbour which once stood on it, with her idea of a Greek temple. Inside the building there was still an old stone bench and table, which Grannie labelled ‘prehistoric’ in the same breath as describing the view from its steps as, ‘Quite the loveliest in Sussex!’
Every winter when the leaves were off the trees, a co-opted party of family and farm workers met in the wood to decide which of the beeches should be lopped to preserve the marvellous view – and as Ned climbed to the recommended viewpoint on the steps, he could still smell the nutty, sawdust scent of their recent adjustments. Below him the wood fell sharply to the angled roofs of the farmhouse and buildings. Along the valley to the north, the old village of Sellington sprouted from the chalk as if it had grown there; and to the south, the land dipped between the bastions of the downs to the flat surface of the English Channel.
It was Ned’s world and the world of all the Ashbys. In effect they owned the valley, the chalk hills on either side of it and most houses in the village; for Ned’s grandfather had entailed the entire property on his lineal descendants, with trustees in Lewes to ensure its smooth succession from one male Ashby to another.
The sun was rising now above the furthest ridge. It sparkled on the water and picked out the rusty sails of half a dozen fishing smacks. Then as Ned watched, it crept across the chalk hills to burnish the thorn hedges in the combe and illuminate a flock of plovers mewing from the turf. From above, the arching patterns of their wings looked like a child’s attempt at drawing birds. But as they wheeled, a hundred white breasts caught the light like aspen leaves blown in the wind.
Which was the moment when, for some curious and unknown reason, the man Llewellen lurched back into Ned’s mind. What would Bat make of such fellow, he thought wryly, if he should suddenly appear in Sellington in his top hat and tails?
‘Now then, Mus Ned, don’t ye go meddlin’ with furriners an’ such. Ye know as well as I do that a Sheere man an’ a Hill man be as different as an ’orse an’ cow!’
As far as the old shepherd was concerned, ‘furriners’ and the ‘sheeres’ began the other side of Brighton; and if they weren’t personally involved with farming or the downland flocks, then they weren’t reckoned one bit in this part of Sussex. It was all so simple after all for people like Bat and Cook; even for Grannie. Because for to them the continuity of their pleasant ordered life beneath the Bury Mound was all that ever mattered.
‘Poor breeders,’ was Gran’s verdict on recent generations of Ashby males. She’d never totally forgiven her own husband for dying so inconveniently soon after the birth of his male heir, nor yet her son for failing to remarry after poor dear Lillian’s demise; whilst Ned was well aware that she and the farm trustees were looking to him now to field a cricket team of heirs! He was to find a suitably fertile girl of the right class, to bear his children and incidentally provide for his male needs. It was all so simply fundamental; a duty that he owed his ancestors and his love of The Bury. He’d been as surely bred for an agricultural destiny as Bat and Danny Goodworth were; as much a part of the unchanging scheme of things as Bess was lying at his feet. Or the Southdown sheep. Or the heavy horses in the stables.
But even so… there was something just too fundamental, too dutiful about it even so, that Ned’s imagination shied from. Life was all tied up for Grannie and Bat Vine and all the rest. But he was a loose end still. He wasn’t like them, not entirely. Because in his world there was something missing – something beyond the compass of his experience or expectation. A question mark. An adventure linked in some way to the drunkard in the Lord John Russell public house, and the golden woman of his calling card.