Evidently Saul Abercrombie was an impatient man. He would have to get used to the fact that his dream couldn’t be realized as quickly as he seemed to wish. He would have to accommodate a huge workforce and massive material disruption. On the other hand, the timing, seasonally, could not really have been better. It was spring, the time of growth and life and regeneration in nature; the time of warmth and fecundity returning to the land and the warming and softening soil beneath its surface.
Curtis had his sample and analysis kit in a canvas grip on the seat beside him. He would need that gear. He also had a freshly pressed suit in a suit bag carefully folded into the Saab’s boot. He didn’t know whether Freemantle’s invitation to stay the night at the estate involved dinner with its master. But he thought it might and wanted, if it did, to observe the necessary courtesies. His formal shoes were polished and he’d even packed a necktie. The truth was that he needed this job pretty desperately.
He drove with the picture in his mind of dinner, of a candelabra-lit baronial hall; Abercrombie and the lissom Francesca seated at a huge table heaped high with dishes, cooling under glittering metal domes as an army of discreet staff served them, Freemantle a red-faced figure in hairy tweeds, blushing as he twisted his cap between ruddy hands, standing awkwardly on.
It wouldn’t be like that, of course. Saul Abercrombie was self-made and the land manager referred to him by his Christian name. He was a man with a bohemian history and a famously common touch, and his daughter would be busily occupied in some exotic and exclusive part of the world a cultural universe away from rural Wales. But the speculation passed the time, diverted him from the motorway monotony of the journey. And Curtis was more relaxed during the four hours his journey took for having packed his suit and scrupulously polished shoes.
He naturally wondered why they had selected him for the job. It was possible he was among a handful of arboreal specialists shortlisted and that this was just a preliminary audition. But his phone conversation with the land manager had suggested otherwise. He was their man, wasn’t he?
He did have some experience of large projects, carried out on-budget and with successful results. Despite this track record, he had no real media profile, which apparently suited Freemantle and, given the nature of the project, the frankly absurd condition of confidentiality insisted upon by his boss.
But he thought probably his bloodline had been the clincher in getting him the job, rather than any professional qualification or career achievement. That would have been the deciding factor when they looked at their shortlist and selected his name from the three or four he imagined would have been written down there.
His father had been Welsh, born in Barmouth in the autumn of 1948. And his father, in common with his own ancestors, had been a fisherman who lived and died in the Kingdom of Wales. Tom Curtis had not been born in Wales, but he could have played rugby for the country had he possessed any aptitude or appetite for the game, and that tended to be the populist qualification on which the nationality of Welshmen was these days judged.
You could not transform the character of so vast a tract of Welsh land in the way that the Englishman Saul Abercrombie intended to. Not without the person orchestrating that transformation having a blood bond with the land undergoing the upheaval, you couldn’t.
The days of burning weekend cottages owned by English visitors seemed thankfully to have gone. But Wales was still a nation in some important regards and it would be only pragmatic for Abercrombie to employ a Welshman to oversee this job. Some would see it as a violation, however handsomely the justification was dressed up. It would be a provocation too far for some of the local population for that violation to be committed by an Englishman.
He reached the western gate on foot. The Saab was fine until the narrow road he was on petered into a lane and then a rutted track. But when the track became rough ground the car didn’t have the clearance for the terrain. By that point the fence securing Abercrombie’s land was in sight, a quarter of a mile distant. He could see the evenly placed wooden stanchions and the sunlit glitter of its steel thorns. He picked his workbag off the passenger seat and locked the car door behind him.
He used the single key couriered to him the previous afternoon to open the heavy padlock securing the gate. Having entered the estate, he paused and looked around and listened, but there was no one there to meet him. He would have seen them over the flat expanse of wild grass rippling greenly in the breeze.
Curtis was aware of how quiet it was. Birdsong came with hedgerows and bushes and the branches of trees in which to nest and perch and there were none of those here. The land was not exactly flat, however. That was an impression given by the openness and scale of what he viewed from where he stood, an illusion strengthened by the vacant expanse of the sky. He was in Wales, not Kansas. The ground undulated beneath its verdant carpet of grass. There were no trails, though, beaten and worn by trampling feet as clues to which direction to take.
He walked for about half an hour. He’d walked in Wales before, but in Snowdonia and the Black Mountains and on the coastal stretch of land between Barmouth and Cader Idris. They were locations characterized by dramatic and even majestic landmarks. This was a wilderness – empty, almost featureless. When eventually he stopped, it was because, practically speaking, he was lost.
He looked around. Slightly to the north-west of where he stood, on a bearing that he reckoned would eventually take him to the cliffs and the sea, he noticed then the smudge of something that looked man-made. It was slate grey and solid and unmoving, but the lie of the land prevented him from seeing more than a fraction of it, low and perhaps a couple of miles distant. He began to walk towards it. It seemed the logical thing for him to do.
He was quite close to this building before the contour of the land exposed more of it and it was finally resolved into a small chapel or church. It was too plain to be a folly. He was only five hundred metres away when it revealed its detail fully as a place of worship built from stone in what he assumed were Saxon times. It was square in shape and a squat single storey only in height.
The studded oak wonder of a door looked original to this building when he reached it. It was blackened by time and exposure but still carried the scars of the primitive tools that had fashioned it in faith. When he pushed it, it creaked open on iron hinges and the cool smell of the church interior was a sudden, stony contrast to the sweet grass smell of the spring morning outside.
Gloom enveloped him. His eyes adjusted to it. He became aware of the one light source in there, beyond the gaps cleaved as narrow as archery slits at even spaces in the masonry.
This was a stained-glass window. It was high to his left and the angle of the sun through it cast shimmering lozenges of light on the wall opposite. There was enough light, now his eyes had grown accustomed, to see that the interior of the church was denuded of any furnishings. There was no altar, no pulpit, no benches in cramped rows or bolsters on which to kneel and pray. There were no lamps. There were no pictures hung or candles in holders to light. The church interior lacked a font. There was just the flagged stone floor and that one ornamental window to look upon, and so he did, studying its detail.
It was not religious in subject matter. If anything, Curtis thought, it might actually be construed as slightly blasphemous.
The window was tall and narrow and arched. It pictured a knight, bareheaded, clad in silver armour. His war horse stood tethered to a sapling with its head bowed to his rear. From his right hand, a bloodied broadsword trailed, its tip buried in the ferns growing lushly around his feet. In the grip of his left fist, his arm extended, he held a severed head by its hair. Its eyes had risen to white blankness in its face in death. It was not human, this grisly trophy displayed by the knight in the stained-glass window. It was twice as large as any human head Curtis had ever seen. And its skin was ridged and coarsened with scales.
‘Man, that’s one ugly motherfucker,’ a voice from behind him said.
Curtis jumped at the sound of the voice and turned and recognized the facial features of Saul Abercrombie contorted into a grin. He looked pleased with himself at the shock he’d just inflicted. ‘Relax, brother,’ he said. He nodded up at the window. ‘The bad guy looks pretty dead to me. Dude in the steel suit saw to that.’
‘Do you know who they are?’
‘It’s a thousand years ago,’ Abercrombie said. ‘People float theories. But guesswork is bullshit. Truth is, nobody knows.’ He put out a hand and Curtis shook it. ‘Saul,’ he said.
‘Tom Curtis.’
‘Yeah, I know. My tree guy.’
‘Only if I pass the audition.’
Abercrombie was slightly shorter than he looked in pictures. He was grey-bearded with white, wavy hair he wore at the same shoulder length he had in the famous picture of his arrest at the Red Lion Square demo back in the early seventies, when his tresses had been a youthful shade of brown. He was wearing a wrinkled blue linen suit, the trousers belted with a knotted club tie. His feet were laced into sneakers. He looked like he always looked, except that on his head was perched a pair of old-fashioned leather aviator goggles, their round glass lenses framed in circles of brass.
He said, ‘I already like the vibe you give off, Tom. I’m rarely wrong about people. We’re simpatico, the two of us. Everything is going to be cool, trust me.’
Curtis heard an engine approaching outside. Because he owned one himself, he knew it belonged to a Land Rover.
Abercrombie cocked his head at the sound. ‘My principle gofer, Sam,’ he said. ‘Quad bikes on the trailer. You and me, Tree Man, are going to take the tour.’
Thus the steampunk goggles, Curtis thought, smiling to himself. There was something slightly pantomimic about Saul Abercrombie. But the man could afford to play the fool, couldn’t he, having proven so conclusively over the years he was anything but. And he was likeable. Curtis realized with surprise that despite all of the reservations and prejudices he’d brought with him to Wales, he’d liked his potential new employer immediately.
‘What is this place, Saul?’
Abercrombie adjusted the goggles over his eyes before answering. Outside, Curtis could hear Freemantle lower a ramp or running boards from the trailer to the ground to unload the bikes.
‘The church is nameless,’ Abercrombie said, blinking. ‘It’s lost, like the identity of the guy who won the argument up there in the window. The spot we’re on is known as Raven Dip. It’s a natural depression, the reason you have to get up close to recognize the building we’re in for what it is.’
‘I saw Raven Dip on the map,’ Curtis said. ‘I studied the lie of the land on my laptop yesterday. I didn’t see any sign of buildings at all.’
‘Google Earth?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re shitting me.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Which goes to prove, you can’t trust anyone,’ Abercrombie said, slapping him on the back and steering him towards the door in a single deft movement of his hand.
The quad bikes gleamed like alien and bulbous toys on the ground outside the old building, the Land Rover already distant, its trailer sashaying when Curtis looked, over the bumps and through the depressions of the ground on the route back to wherever it came from.
The estate occupied a tract of land that stretched seaward to an area of the Pembrokeshire coastline between Fishguard and Aberaeron. That finite boundary was made up of eight miles of cliffs. They ranged in height from about seventy feet to over 200 in a couple of places, undulating smoothly rather than raggedly because this part of the coastline was not prey to the erosion, Abercrombie told him, that plagued the eastern shoreline of Britain, ravaged as it was by the North Sea.
They toured the perimeter, travelling counter-clockwise. They stopped only when they reached what Abercrombie announced was the tallest of his sea-facing promontories, the one offering the best view out west over the water in the direction of Ireland and, beyond that, six thousand miles away, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
They were quiet for a moment, seated on the bikes, Curtis enjoying the relative peace after the belligerent roar of their engines, aware after a few moments of the rhythmic wash of the surf on the shore a fairly remote distance beneath them.
Abercrombie sniffed and lifted his goggles up on to his head. He looked skyward and said, ‘Is salt a serious downer? In the rain, I mean, at the edge of the sea?’
‘It’s a common enough fallacy,’ Curtis said. ‘But most of your clouds coming from offshore will have gathered above the Irish land mass. Even if they hadn’t, clouds don’t carry salt in damaging concentrations. Drench would be a problem. Persistent sea spray could afflict the soil. But everything on your land is so far above sea level it nullifies all that.’
‘Anything else that should be costing me sleep?’
‘The depth and pH balance of the soil. Mature root systems will undermine the cliffs if the soil isn’t there to sufficient depth.’
‘You’ll measure all of that shit, right?’
‘I’ll do all the testing necessary,’ Curtis said. ‘But I’m reasonably confident, having seen what you’ve shown me, that your plan’s achievable. The scale is pretty awesome. But we’re only really putting back what was originally there.’
Abercrombie was quiet for such a long time that Curtis thought perhaps he hadn’t heard this last remark. There wasn’t much wind to snatch away his words. But men of his new boss’s vintage were sometimes a little deaf. Then, quietly, Abercrombie said, ‘When was the last time you were allowed to see your daughter?’
‘It’ll be four months on Tuesday.’
‘Bummer.’
‘I’m surprised you know about that.’
‘You shouldn’t be. I like to know everything significant about the guys I hire.’
‘Is it significant?’
‘On a project this size, everything is that could put it in jeopardy. Anyway, it sounds like a bitch of a problem.’