“Would you give me shelter for the night?”
The woman nodded.
Later that evening she saw the woman carry out several black objects which looked to her like stones but which she soon discovered were lumps of old meat that had been soaked in salt and which now the woman was quietly boiling over the fire in a pot. She ate, glad that it was hot and salty, and that night, in one corner of a caravan, with her clothes already dried, her horse attended to, and the gypsy woman lying so near to her they almost touched, she slept a deep sleep.
She paid them and left at dawn.
She had never seen the spring dawn over the plain. Great bands of saffron yellow, orange and magenta light filled the eastern horizon. How sweet the wet turf smelled. Patches of furze, and here and there, delicate wild flowers were showing the first hint of colour and blossom in that cold March spring. The horizon was shimmering; the open sky had been washed clear and blue by yesterday’s rains; the red sun was filling the distant sweeps of ground with an orange glow. It grew lighter. Nearby, a lark was rising.
As she looked towards the sunrise, over that beautiful, harsh emptiness, she knew that she wanted Jethro. It was so simple, this primitive, ancient world up on the high ground.
She wanted to be with him, as she had been before, on the edge of the great chalk nakedness of the plain.
As she came slowly down into the valley, where the farmhouses were stirring, the poignancy of this desire and longing grew: she ached again.
And yet, she knew it could not be.
She was not surprised by what she found.
The farm was a pleasant, white house with a tiled roof and an air of modest prosperity about it.
She sat on her horse and looked it over carefully. Jethro had been lucky. One of the children appeared, saw her, ducked back into the house, and a few moments later a dark-haired young woman appeared.
She moved with a slow, casual insolence, taking Jane in with curiosity. She stood in front of her.
“Lookin’ for Jethro?”
“Yes.”
The look in the girl’s eyes was not hostile, not suspicious, just curious. But also it told her, beyond the shadow of a doubt that she knew. She knew. Not, probably, that she had been told. She knew by instinct. And strange to say, it did not even make her blush.
Why should it? She had just spent a night with the gypsies and seen the dawn rising, over the plain.
“I’m Jethro’s woman now.” She said it quite factually, flatly. There was a pause. “He went out early. Be back in an hour. You want to wait for him?”
Jane smiled. Why, now of all times, should she feel such calmness, a lifting of the spirit? She almost laughed. Should she wait for Jethro? There seemed no point. She had seen his farm, his woman.
“No,” she smiled. And with a wry irony, “I was just passing.”
She turned her horse.
As she rode slowly up the slope and reached the beginning of the high ground again, she thought she caught sight of him, a solitary figure moving along the edge of the ridge. She did not turn towards him; she nudged her horse forward and became, once again, a part of the plain.
The scandal of Jane Shockley’s adventure took years to die down.
By nine o’clock the previous night, the houses in the close themselves seemed to be huddling together in a speculative murmur. She had gone out in the early morning in a hurry – the groom had been questioned. She had attacked Hob Nob in the street with her riding crop – the whole town was buzzing with that. And now she had completely vanished – no one knew where.
Only one man had an inkling. Which was why in this early morning a search party was sent far out onto the plain, since Mr Mason had told them he thought she might have gone riding there. More than this Mr Mason, with quiet wisdom, did not choose to say.
Stephen Shockley was beside himself: so much so that from the hours of nine until eleven at night, he had stood with his stick in the hall, motionless, refusing a chair, and receiving a constant stream of folk from the close as the drama continued.
But the greatest scandal of all had been when Miss Shockley, somewhat unkempt, arrived back at noon the next day and announced as though it were the smallest thing in the world, that she had been caught in a storm and spent the night with gypsies.
After that, it was universally agreed, poor Stephen Shockley had begun the long but irrevocable process of his last, bitter decline.
It was a month after this that Mr Porters made the Christian, not to say heroic gesture of offering, if not to restore her reputation, at least to force the shocked scandal to subside, by offering, once again, to marry her.
To his astonishment, she refused. He retired to his villa shaking his head and concluding – what else could one do – that he had probably been lucky, since Miss Shockley was, it must be supposed, a little unbalanced.
1889
To a casual visitor entering the quiet city of Salisbury on that warm Sunday morning it might have seemed impossible that anything could disturb its sedate calm.
Yet in fact the place was in a state of seething controversy in which, as in centuries past, a powerful bishop was at war with half the town.
Had the visitor entered the even greater stillness of the close itself, it would certainly have seemed that the brisk woman of sixty with her long white dress, her parasol and her elegant, buttoned kid walking boots, who was stepping into a landau in the north walk, must be the very quintessence of respectability. As respectable, say, as the severe, grey-haired man who was politely handing her in.
And indeed, in a general sense, when Miss Shockley and old Mr Porters set out together for Cranborne Chase that August morning, they still were.
It was very quiet. There was movement in the close, of course, but it was subdued, as if the place was patiently aware that the bell for matins was about to ring.
By the choristers’ green, an ancient water cart, that sprayed the road surface to keep down the dust, was making its creaking rounds, pulled by a horse which, like the battered straw hat on its head, had seen better, but not quieter days.
From Mompesson House, Miss Barbara Townsend, swathed in shawls, made her way across to the south gate, carrying her sketch pad and water colours. And now, through the gate from the High Street an ox cart lumbered slowly in containing no less a figure than one of the cathedral’s residentiary canons and his family, come to spend his obligatory three months in the close and perform his cathedral duties.
Today, however, Jane Shockley was in a state of suppressed excitement. For tomorrow she was going into battle against the bishop. And the day after that . . . She smiled inwardly. The day after that, she would cause an even bigger stir.
There had been no scandal attached to her for thirty years. Since her Uncle Stephen’s death she had lived alone in the house in the close. Ten years before, her brother Bernard had returned to England, but he had gone to live on the edge of the New Forest near Christchurch. She had become, in the manner of Victorian ladies of Salisbury close, rather formidable. The night with the gypsies had not, of course, been forgotten. But the young folk in the close no longer believed it. She was as respectable a figure as one of the Hammick, Hussey, Townsend, Eyre or Jacob families who formed the principal aristocracy of the place.
Indeed, so successful had she become over the years at projecting a forthright and rather daunting image of herself that her opinion was much sought after and she generally got her own way.
The landau began to roll out of the close.
It was just as it entered the High Street that a stout, elderly man hurried forward and hailed the coachman. As the landau stopped, he came beside it and looked in. For a moment his face fell.
Mr Porters and Mr Mason stared at each other with distaste: they were on opposite sides in the bishop’s great controversy. Then Mason addressed himself to Jane.
“You will not forget us tomorrow, Miss Shockley? You will come and speak?”
She looked at him evenly. The old relationship from the time when she had looked after Jethro had been replaced by something tougher.
“Yes, Mr Mason, if I can count on you in turn.”
He looked uncertain.
“If not, then of course . . .”
“You can count on me,” he said hurriedly. Her presence, evidently, was important to him.
She smiled.
“Drive on, Baynes,” she called to the coachman.
As the carriage left the city and began to rise up the slope to Harnham Hill, she felt quietly elated. She had secured Mason for her cause. He might not do much, but every person she could get was important. Now her eyes turned back to Porters. How upright he sat, his straight back hardly touching the carriage seat. He reminded her – it was a cruel thought – of a solemn moth that had been pinned to a board. She was sure she could win him over too, to add to her little collection.
For that was the real reason why she had agreed to his suggestion that they visit Cranborne Chase together that day. It was a chance to test her arguments out on him.
They went up Harnham Hill. Looking down on the city, she marvelled at how it was spreading. The new suburbs of which Mr Porters was so proud stretched half way to Old Sarum now. The world was changing.
But Porters was not looking at the view as he pursed his lips. He was brooding about Mason and the bishop.
The great battle that was rocking Salisbury, and that had even caused questions to be raised in Parliament, concerned the city’s schools. There were not enough of them and more must be provided. The question was, what sort of schools and who was to run them? The large community of non-conformists, led by men like Mason, wanted non-denominational schools run by the state boards that the great Education Act of 1870 had provided for. The bishop would not hear of it. He and the Conservatives were determined to provide an Anglican school instead. The bishop would not give way, he declared, as long as he had a penny in his pocket. Besides, Conservatives agreed, why should the ratepayers’ money be used when funds had been offered to supply an Anglican school from private sources?
Bishop Wordsworth was a brilliant and powerful man, one of the remarkable family that had produced in the last century numerous formidable minds including the great poet. Many in Sarum knew of the family dinners when Wordsworth would decide beforehand whether to converse in English, Latin or classical Greek. And no one was surprised that so far the non-conformists of Salisbury had been defeated by the bishop at every turn.
To Jane Shockley it seemed unfair.
“I fear Mason’s business is a mistake. I am sorry, Miss Shockley, that out of motives of kindness you encourage him.” He was jealous of course. Even now, he still wanted to monopolise her. She smiled and ignored the rebuke as the landau slowly crested the hill.
Porters supported the bishop, not because his sympathies were strongly in either direction, but because he was sure that Wordsworth’s case under the Education Act was correct.
“Which is not the point,” Jane had tried to explain to him.
It was certainly useful for Mason to have her on his side: after all, she was a respected lady of the close, on good terms with the bishop. Her presence there would suggest that the non-conformists might yet find unexpected friends.
The whole conservative establishment of the city was against the non-conformists – Swayne, Hammick, the
Salisbury Journal
. Someone had even tried to persuade old Lord Forest to raise the question in the House of Lords. But since he had sold off his last half chequer of property in Salisbury some years before, he had refused to take any further interest in the place. But they were all wrong. It was daring of Mason to have chosen the White Hart Hotel for his meeting too, she thought, for it was a favourite Conservative meeting place. Yes, there should be fireworks at the meeting tomorrow, and she looked forward to it.
But today they were bound on a very different mission. They were going to Cranborne Chase.
The great sweep of land that lay south west of Sarum had always been a desolate place. Across it, nearly two thousand years before, the Romans had built the road that went to the heart of the territory of the proud Durotriges. A few small settlements had sprung up there in later Saxon times and medieval kings had hunted there. But generally speaking, the place had retained its character from prehistoric times, with a combination of forest, clearing, and bare wilderness dotted with sparse hamlets. It invited few visitors.
And yet, the Chase in recent years had become one of the most extraordinary places in England.
For in the middle of the Chase lay a great estate – some twenty-five thousand acres – recently and unexpectedly inherited by a talented man, known to history as General Pitt-Rivers.
So it came about that, in the 1880s, the people of Sarum were suddenly aware that in the empty region to the south west, something very strange was happening.