Dozer had dropped Luke at the turning where the roads split to Wincanton, Pen Selwood and Cucklington. ‘We’ll be back this way quite soon. Come and visit when we’re digging,’ said the man. ‘Be seeing you.’
The boy waved his thanks as the truck drove away, then stood quite still, looking back the way they had come. For a moment he thought of cycling all the way back again to search for them but he knew that was hopeless – a random line lancing out into a wide spray of possibilities of near-misses, of bad timing and hidden views. Would he sense her? From how far? A field’s width on the wrong side of a concealing hedge?
Something old and experienced whispered in his head. Trust her. Wait here. Be here for her. When she gets here, you’ll know.
He wished he could send his mind reaching out from his body to find them, out there to the south-west. He tried to imagine that, probing beyond Wincanton, opening up his whole head to sense something far off. Nothing came.
The road shimmered for a moment, shifted its shape, but modern noise drove it back to tarmac and the present and a green van, changing gear as it went past him. He calmed himself, breathing deeply and evenly, blotting out the traffic’s roar from the main road close by. He remembered what he had just seen and played with the road, letting it dissolve from dark grey to brown and white, rough earth and broken stone, helping it narrow to a track as the grass grew in from the edges and blurred the sharper modern boundaries. There were no more cars, only bird-song.
He looked up the curve of the lane towards old Pen, and in this quieter world he heard feet scuffing on the loose stone and the sounds of distress. Turning his head back towards Wincanton, he saw four men approaching, coming from the distant town. They were young men, walking awkwardly, carrying something between them, one at each corner. Without knowing quite how, he found himself walking as one of them, saw that his own hands were gripping a corner of their shared burden. Then he looked down at what they were carrying on their litter and saw the gasping girl with the white face and the blood trickling from the corner of her mouth and her eyes fixed on his. As their eyes met, the narrow channels of his schoolboy heart were filled with adult love and horror.
‘I’m taking you home,’ an older voice said and it came, shaking, from his own mouth, familiar and bewildering.
Back across an hour or several hundred years, he saw the two of them behind the hedge, huddled, hiding from the sudden musket fire, caught up in someone else’s ambush. He saw the horse plunge, black, through the bursting branches as he raised an arm as if he could fend it off. From below its belly he looked up at the stirrups and the trooper’s spurred boots as one hoof punched down into her breast. The ground drummed and as the unheeding soldier galloped away bent on his escape he looked down at her – curling, soaked in her pain, and knew she could not live.
Stumbling along the road again, he clutched the rough litter with this man’s hands, listening to every hard breath, and fixed his eyes on hers as he saw her dwindle from him. He was flooded with the certainty of loss and the need to get her home before she died. The house was four hundred strides away, three hundred, two hundred, and she had to be there in time to feel its safety comforting her death.
A horn shocked him back and the dusty path grew hard and dark again. He stepped aside out of the way of the car whose driver mouthed cross words through the glass, and of course by then the litter and his dying wife had gone, back to their own time – back to the time when Dutch William marched in to deal with cruel Catholic James and a forgotten skirmish claimed her life. In that memory she whispered a different name to Luke and she had a name too, and he hadn’t pinned them down in time so they had blown away with the car horn.
He came back into a world where Dutch William meant nothing to him at all and where only one thing had not changed. The house stood just ahead. Bagstone was at the centre of all this, that he knew. The teacher was squatting there and he was quite sure the teacher knew his real name. Nobody answered his knock and he sat down in the porch, determination and certainty growing with every breath as the vast shape of an old man’s memory surrounded him, even if he could not yet open its doors or discern its detail. He tried to wring the past out of the house, staring at the stones as if his history was written on them, and that was when it became clear to him that the cottage was not his only resource – that there was a better place to go, a place where the past really was written in stone.
He walked north through the diffuse village, past fields punctuated by the occasional cottage, knowing his way so long as he left it to his legs and not his head. He came to the churchyard at the far side of the village and wandered through the older graves until he arrived at a crooked stone splashed with lichen, its cut letters washed almost smooth by a thousand storms. A tremor from the past stopped him there. He crouched to stare at the lettering, trying to see any clear form in the remains of the grooves. He felt them with his fingers and found only ambiguous erosion but then something came out of memory into his left hand, an iron tool, and he found himself cleaning out the letters. A matching mallet bulked from nowhere into his right hand. There he was in the deeper silence of past times, halfway through the task of deepening the first cuts, chasing out sharp sprays from the new stone. He was cutting the stone for her, set up on a trestle right by the fresh grave, somewhere back in the long age of hand-power and horsepower.
He was young and she had been young, and that time a new fever got her for which she had not found a remedy.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ she had said before she closed her eyes. The sadness got him. The letter he was shaping was a ‘G’ but he could not find the next one however hard he tried.
Movement caught his eye across the graveyard, beyond the trees, and brought him back. A man walking, slowly. He saw Michael Martin stop and look down. The boy rose carefully to his feet, circled round between the bushes as if he were stalking an animal, keeping to the outer edge of the graveyard all the way until he stood a few yards behind the man. Here the stones were modern, crisp and upright.
The teacher was staring at a white gravestone. The boy moved forward carefully and quietly until he was just feet behind the man. He could read the simple inscription. It said ‘Ferney Miller. Born November 8th 1907. Died February 7th 1991.’
‘Ferney.’ The name burst out of him and the teacher turned sharply at the sound of his voice. ‘Ferney, Ferney, FERNEY! That’s it!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s my name. It is, isn’t it?’
Michael Martin’s face was white. ‘Don’t say that. How can it be?’ he said.
The boy who had been Luke was dancing in his excitement, spinning round, jumping as if a wound spring had burst free inside him. ‘Because it is. You know it is. Tell me. It is, isn’t it? You have to say.’
The teacher shrank away from the demonic boy, bruised by his joy and the new energy that was overflowing out of him, shaking his head.
‘Say it,’ said the boy, and the teacher barely breathed the word.
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ the boy called. ‘I am Ferney. Of course I am.’
The teacher sat down on the grass as if his legs had given way.
‘I guessed,’ he said. ‘I guessed but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t let myself. Those things you knew. The way you were in the car. You bastard.’
The boy flinched, looked at him in shock, took a step backwards.
‘You expect me to be glad to see you?’ the teacher asked. ‘You think this is some sort of cause for celebration after what you did to me? Don’t shake your head. You know what I’m talking about.’
‘I don’t,’ the boy managed to answer before his voice broke up and, to his fury, tears began to run down his cheeks.
That stopped the teacher. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘You’re just a boy. When did you start to know?’
The boy sniffed fiercely, wiped his eyes, tried to get back in control. ‘Yesterday.’
‘This is too much,’ said the teacher. ‘I’ve got to go,’ but the boy pointed to the bunch of wild flowers in his hand.
‘Who are those for?’ he asked.
The man shook his head, ‘As if you don’t know. They’re just for . . .’ but then his voice failed him too and he walked across to another new stone, laying the flowers down in front of it. The boy followed him, knelt and read the inscription out loud. ‘To the memory of Mary Martha Gabriella Martin and Rosie Juliet Martin, who died in love together. January 31st 1994.’ It shocked him and he did not know why. He had expected one name, a different name, though he did not know what it was.
‘Who were they?’ he asked. ‘Mary Martin? Martin? That’s your name.’
The teacher looked sharply at him. ‘My wife,’ he said curtly.
The boy looked back at the stone, mouthing the name. ‘Mary? Is that what people called her?’
‘She was Gabriella.’ The teacher chose the half-truth. He kept the other half to himself.
‘So who was Rosie?’ But Michael Martin turned his back on the stone and walked away. Then he stopped abruptly and looked back and his face had softened. An expression of mild wonder came over it as a spark of hope was born and turned into words.
‘If you’re back, then . . .’ He stopped himself.
‘Yes?’ The boy’s eyes were fixed on him. ‘What?’ But the teacher’s face closed like a steel gate slamming. ‘I’m going home,’ he said.
When the teacher left the boy stood utterly still, feeling his forgotten name washing through him, cleaning out the corners of his soul. He walked slowly around the whole graveyard, staring at the stones, feeling some vague recognition of almost every one of them, like a janitor unlocking rooms for the coming day. He looked at the church with its low tower and knew that since the days even before that stone church first stood, there had always been a Ferney here. With the dying girl on her litter fresh in his mind, he saw how this walled yard contained sorrow and loss and loneliness repeated through the ages, and he walked to the western corner where he had buried her that time. There was no sign of her grave in the place where he knew she lay, but overlapping it was a grey stone slab with a Victorian date on it and a stranger’s name. He minded that for a moment before he remembered how it was. Five deaths a year in the old village, thirty or more in the worst times – the sick times, the hungry times. He did the sums. Say seven hundred in a century, ten thousand since this church first stood. Of course she had vanished into the absorbing sponge of earth, dug over again and again, and so had he, time after time. Most of their memorials were long gone, wood rotting, stone washed and frosted smooth and cast away when nobody remembered any more.
He remembered.
He went back to his own gravestone, ‘Ferney Miller. Born November 8th 1907. Died February 7th 1991’, then searched along the eastern side until he found the one before, mossy and indistinct in weathered sandstone. He crouched and rubbed at the cuts with his finger, feeling the letters to spell them out. ‘F Carter, b 2 March 1878 d 14 April 1907.’ As he stood up, he saw there was more lettering below and tore handfuls of grass away to see the further words cut in later, deeper, by a different mason’s hand.
There was the record of her death, his wife’s death, eight months after his, and there was her name. Just five letters. The name he had been hunting for, the everlasting name that transcended every other wrong and arbitrary name with which she had ever been christened. He stared at it, traced the lettering with his fingers, said it to himself then said it again out loud, shouting it, astonished that he could have forgotten it, feeling every particle of every past version of her laughing with him from the earth now that he knew what she was called.
He looked back at the dates on that stone and found he could read a story in them. He had died at just twenty-nine. She had waited until she could bear it no longer and then she had followed him. No, there was more to it than that. Being born close by was always the safest way back to an easy return. She would have stayed her hand until some local girl was expecting.
Words whispered in his head from the grave in front of him. Her words. ‘We’re sentenced to life, you and me. It’s only bearable together.’ And he thought of the girl at Montacute. He had been drawn to her, drawn all that way until they had been only yards apart, linked by the electric earth, and in any kinder world they would have discovered each other within a minute. He had missed the chance, the huge chance, and now where was she? Out there, groping her way to him or not? Had the instinct that was guiding her faded as she left Montacute? Was she even now saying ‘No, let’s go home’ to her friends? ‘I don’t know why I wanted to go to Pen Selwood’? He knew there was no certainty unless she found this place and discovered the full truth of who she was. Every chance of happiness for the two of them hung in the balance. He stared down at the grass over her grave and shut out the background of the modern world and heard a voice, clear. ‘We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young,’ it said. The voice might have been his or hers. It had a lilt to it, the suggestion of a tune, and like some sort of code it unlocked an instruction in him, a deep impulse.
He left the churchyard, cycled eastward to a track through the woods on the edge of the village. He pushed his bike amongst the trees, knowing he had to find a pit – a place he could see clearly in his mind’s eye. Then he saw not just one pit but hundreds upon hundreds of them, stretching out between the trees on both sides for as far as he could see, a landscape of shallow, brambled craters. He stilled his mind and cast around, testing the air for the right direction, abandoning his bike and moving into the trees along the curving honeycomb of narrow earth ridges separating them. Following his instinct, he groped and sniffed his way to the right one, far from the track, and when he was certain, he knelt to rip out roots, shovelling the earth away with bare mole hands until he found what he was looking for. His fingers touched a smooth surface and he pulled out a plastic sandwich box, taped tight shut. He sat in silence, holding it, the first real, solid evidence of the truth of what his mind was telling him.
It took a minute to gather the bravery he needed to peel away the tape. Inside he found a letter, as he knew he would – a message from his last self to the next. With it was a small package, well wrapped and heavy. He opened the envelope, sat for a while reading and thinking, then he pocketed some of the contents of the package, buried the box again and set out to follow the letter’s directions, cycling slowly off to beat the bounds of his land and find the rest of himself.
He stopped again almost immediately at a field corner where a row of stones chilled him, just one stub of wall acting as a windbreak to a feeding trough. The letter had advised him what to do.
‘Deal directly with your fears and her fears. There is no fear that stands up to explanation. Go open-minded through this place and stop where your skin crawls. Face it, know it and gain by it.’
He built the long-demolished cottage out of its diminished traces, saw the frantic daughter run out to seize his arm as he walked by one Victorian day, smelt the beery breath of the drunken father half his size again, a knife pressed against his wife’s throat. He had spoken the same gentling words he used for horses, soothing, soothing, soothing until the angry arm had calmed and drooped. It was not like learning, not quite like remembering – more a matter of unforgetting, knowing how to see what was already there, bringing back a confidence in how to be.
Fears were only part of it. On a south-facing hillside with a fine view he went back two hundred years to rescue a troubled painter from the petulant wreck of his easel, listened patiently to his complaints about the ungrateful world of art, discussed the painting of a picture with him and came away understanding something more of self-esteem. His tour continued back and forth through the carnage of the plagues, rebellion, the brutality of purges pagan, Catholic and Protestant as he circled the village, soaking up the sight of it now with eyes which mixed it with older times, blending in its history.
On Coombe Street past Pen Mill, the landscape dragged his eyes northward. Leaving his bicycle, he walked into the wide valley and stared across the grass to the woods rising, covering the castle hilltop. Old despair touched him and he stared at the woods, seeing them waver in his sight, shrinking, growing, through a thousand indistinct variations. He had a sense of running, legs pumping, and held on to it, welcoming and retaining that despair again, and when he looked up the trees were gone, the hill ahead of him was bare and the stone keep of the castle was rising on the mound that crowned it. His son’s name came back to him and he was running in sorrow and desperation to tell Gally the worst of news, chased all the way, chased to his death.
When he sobbed his way back to the modern age, remembering what sharp-bladed war was like, he sensed himself in all his ages, gathered round to comfort this fresh arrival, and he knew he had learned to wake them when he chose.
For the rest of the afternoon he wandered the lacework paths that crossed the fields and carried on where modern roads stopped short. The field names came back to him like blessings: the Level Piece, Broom Close, Roses Mead, Starveacre and Smoke Hay, Matrimony, Christenings and Matron’s Ground. He sat on the earth rampart of the second castle at Ballands, looking out at the valley westward, running his eyes over the hummocks and dips surrounding him on that open hillside, and found he knew what lay beneath each and every mound.
The young man who came to the third castle, Cockroad Wood, was no longer the half-boy who had started the journey. This castle guarded the western escarpment and the priory track. No stone keep here. No sign left of the wooden tower and the village which once sat inside the palisade, but Luke was entirely gone and Ferney had filled out, secure in the knowledge that he could conjure it back if he chose from the vast regained depths of memory.
Then he went home.