by Paul Hazel
Hunt?” Strangely he could not read her face. “Or Mrs.
Norfolk?” he suggested more tentatively.
“That will not be necessary,” Wykeham interrupted.
Plum’s eyes were suddenly on his. Her color deepened.
“But I insist,” Longford rumbled. “After all, I had
promised.”
“You needn’t have,” Wykeham said. “Quite by chance I
have managed to find someone myself.”
After dinner, while the men were still seated and Plum
was out of the room, Longford put the question directly.
The Hill and the Tower
71
“What exactly do you know about this woman?” he
asked.
“Do either of you want tea?” Plum inquired from the
kitchen where she had seemed for a time unusually quiet.
Longford murmured noncommittally.
“Yes,” Wykeham said. “Thank you.”
They both heard the water spilling from the tap. With
noisy efficiency Plum seemed to be clearing away, washing up
and brewing the tea all at once. What’s got into her? Longford
wondered. He glanced at the open doorway as her shadow
passed. After several minutes Plum came in with a tray.
“Nearly forty," Longford was saying. “1 daresay that
seems a safe age in a woman.” But noticing the look on
Plum’s face, he added charitably: “Of course age is merely a
state of mind.”
Rewarded with a smile, he turned again to Wykeham.
“Certainly,” he said, “you woiddn’t object if Mrs. Longford
were to call on her.” He looked to see Wykeham’s reaction
and added, although nothing more was needed: “Certain
little formalities. You can well understand.” Well satisfied
with himself, he stood for a long moment in the middle of the
room, smiling. Out of the corner of his eye Wykeham saw
Plum look hastily away.
They carried their tea into the parlor.
The furniture, in large measure, had come with the
parsonage. Except for a chair or two and a photograph of
Longford’s father, looking very much like Longford himself,
the furnishings were in fact Wykeham’s, having come down
with the estate and passed along with the pulpit, for temporary use, from one minister to the next. There were pieces from a half dozen periods, English and Dutch, pieces elegant
and droll, austere and operatic. Wykeham sank willingly into
the stiff, horsehair sofa Longford loathed and seemed, Plum
thought, almost immediately pleased with it. He balanced his
cup on his knees in a way that made her think of an Oxford
dandy. Yet, with his big hands and square shoulders, he
would not have appeared out of place among the laborers her
husband had hired on his behalf. Indeed, she imagined he
was skillful at things that they were and her husband was not.
Plum glanced across the room at her husband. The
questions about Wykeham’s schooling and travels had been
exhausted insofar as Longford had patience to ask or to listen.
7 2
WINTERKING
Wykeham had already promised twice to visit Black Wood
and pay a call on John Chance. Tim ran his blunt lingers
along the spine of his book. She saw he was preparing himself
and wished somehow she were sitting next to him and could
slip her hand into his. Then he could ask what he liked. Yet
she blamed herself for having argued with him earlier. Nevertheless, she dreaded the question. Only the strength of her deep affection kept her quiet.
Longford arched his wide brows. “I have the distinct
impression,” he said, beginning already well into his argument, “that there is a new tree in East Wood.”
Wykeham waited.
“Undoubtedly it isn’t the sort of thing you would likely
have noticed?"
Slowly Wykeham finished his tea. He glanced at Plum
before he set his cup aside. Finally, he shook his head.
“I didn’t think you would,” said Longford, disappointed.
“Though I can assure you it is there now and wasn’t yesterday.”
There was a pause. Plum had such a strong sense of
impending disaster she nearly stood. She was looking for an
excuse to mention the hour, to remind Wykeham that he
ought to be going. She was even willing, somewhat contradictorily, to offer more tea though she knew perfectly well none was wanted.
“You can imagine, I hope, my astonishment,” Longford
was saying. “I have paid extraordinary attention to the trees
in East Wood. There are one or two matters about them I
had planned to discuss with you. Trivial, some might think.
But from my own point of view I should say they were most
important.” His handsome face tightened with seriousness.
Plum saw him about to plunge once again along a path the
young man, not knowing him, could not have expected to
follow. She wished Wykeham were the gentleman she was
now fairly certain he was not. Then he might have succeeded,
where she admitted only failure, in diverting him.
“A tree?” Wykeham showed no expression but Plum
knew very well he goaded him.
Longford nodded. “Precisely,” he said. “A tree where no
tree had been.” His voice made an eager, quivering sound,
not at all like a clergyman’s.
The curtains stirred dully in back of him. Plum could
hear the whisper of the cloth as clearly as if it were the sly
The Hill and the Tower
7 3
whisper of women in the parish hall. A half dozen churches in
a dozen years. A sadness fell on her. During their last months
in Maryland, as elsewhere, there had been talk. She was
prepared as well for silence. But Wykeham turned his head.
“How did you first come to notice it?” he asked, without
a trace of irony.
Longford thought the question over. “It is easy enough
to see,” he said at last. “But the reason I saw it, I believe,
was that I so thoroughly hadn’t expected it to be there.” He
drew a breath and eased himself up in the chair. “For a
week," he said, “whenever I went out to Greenchurch, I had
watched that little bit of wood. I was waiting to see, when the
trees came to leaf, which wouldn’t bloom and were dead
timber. You see 1 wanted your permission, a favor to some
studies I am pursuing, to cut a few branches, maybe a tree or
two, so I could get a clearer view from the house to the
river.”
Longford leaned a little nearer. “You, William, would not
have minded. It was old wood and scarcely a leaf. . .” He
remembered the top of the hill. There had been a view over
great stretches of bare limbs and, in patches, the pearly mist
of the river. “It would not have done much damage,” he said.
“Dead wood and dying. I know, I am pleased to think, every
inch of the timber. I had picked out the trees." Though he
had just got himself going, he made himself stop. The night
air moved the curtain. He was trying not to think of his wife,
who was sitting very still, watching him.
“It’s in this book,” Longford said because suddenly he
was beginning to discover
that he had not the words for the
turning of his own thought. “One of the two books,” he said
after a moment, “you were kind enough to bring up from
New Awanux. You didn’t by any chance happen to look
through it?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s in here,” Longford said. “Not the whole thing
of course. I’ve seen the clues myself, followed them in fact for
some time, until, quite independently, they led me here.
Really the book is no more than the confirmation of my own
work.” He leaned farther out and gave the small volume to
Wykeham. He waited while Wykeham folded back the front
cover. There was the same plate of a naked Indian Wykeham
had seen in the shop on Abbey Street. On an inside page he
7 4
W IN TE R IN G
found the title: T he C elt a n d the R ed Man: A Prelim inary
Discourse on the O ld Welsh Origins o f the Algonquin Language.
The book had been published in Boston in the middle of the
last century. Wykeham turned past the table of contents.
"Proofs,” the author began, “must not be arguments, but
testimonies.”
Longford cleared his throat.
“I believe,” he said rapidly, “that the first Indians, the
true Indians, were Welsh.” He forced himself to smile. “If
you know how to look, everything points to it. Though I do
sometimes wish I were an etymologist.” Indeed it annoyed
him that he could pronounce a mere fraction of the words
whose embedded sources and branching histories he had
followed in his reading. He suspected, because he had not
mastered the sounds, that some meaning always eluded him.
“Yet I haven’t done badly,” he said. “I have made astounding
progress, especially in the relationship between topography
and language. And yet,” he said, “if only one had other lives.
Time to pursue things thoroughly. Haven’t you wished that
yourself?”
“I thought they were Chinamen,” Wykeham said.
“Oh they w ere,” Longford answered. “Yes. Very definitely. Beyond dispute. But later.” Suddenly he looked very grave. “It all sounds, I know, William, quite foolish. But it
fits. Not perfectly by any means; but a sight better than any
other explanation I’ve heard of. For one thing there are
dolmens. Right here in the village. In Devon. Huge upright
stones and root cellars. Though of course they aren’t root
cellars at all. And writing on the bare rock! Not simple
pictographs but whole stanzas: battles and eulogies, clear
facts of history. In deep-cut Ogham letters!” An effervescence
of spirit had filled him. He leaned forward as though catching
the breeze from the window. Plum, for once, gazed at him
without pity.
“I know,” Longford said. “Certainly, I know what you
think.” But his look implored Wykeham not to judge him too
quickly. “I can show you the proof,” he admonished him.
“And not only in the stones and cellars of the village.”
Looking away, Wykeham began to explore the pages of
the book. There were drawings of boulders cradled on smaller
stones and drawings on Indian sachems, spear-armed alone
by a poo! in a wood or surrounded by archers, Indians
The Hill and the Tower
75
kneeling before altars or standing under the open sky on the
bluffs at Ohomowauke. But for the most part there were
drawings of letters, plate after plate of Ogham nicks and
scratches, cut on squared stone or wooden billets, the English translations marching sensibly along underneath.
“Stones can be forgeries,” Longford said. “I’m the first to
admit that. The fanners who first settled here were learned
men, university men not of few of them, reading Phoenician
and writing Greek.”
Plum was looking out the window. On the far side, across
the darkened green, the lights were burning in Charon
Hunt’s garage. She could make out a knot of men standing
there. It was difficult to see their faces but their figures, in
the illumination of the garage lamps, had a dramatic and
furtive quality. Hunt himself had seldom been anything but
polite to her. But Plum had always had the impression, even
when he wasn’t, that he was scowling. He was a large man,
strong and angular, of no certain age. He had masses of deep
red hair crowding low on his forehead. It was not exactly that
she objected to the man’s coloring. Yet neither was it entirely
unrelated, she reflected, to the brashness and anger she
sensed was inside him. He had as well, she knew, a habit of
appearing where he was least expected, like the morning she
had watched him speeding recklessly down the winding drive
from Greenchurch, too preoccupied or too guilty to wave.
The breeze touched her face and she sighed, wondering for
the moment less about her husband than what Charon Hunt
and his cronies were up to. She was all but certain they were
up to no good.
Wykeham’s gray-black eyes held no hint of amusement.
Longford was explaining how the river, along the stretch
that included both Ohomowauke and Devon, described, as
though by a conscious act of will, an almost perfect letter “S.”
“Except,” he said, “to my mind it isn’t properly an ‘S’ at all.
At least not any longer. You see I’m rather persuaded that
over the last half century or so it’s been changing.”
He stood up. “I have,” he said, “if you care to have a
look, some drawings of my own,” He went to his desk and
pulled open the drawer. He was glad that Plum was there.
He hadn’t, so far, explained this to anyone, not in any great
detail. It was time she heard it fully. He spread a large
wrinkled paper on the desk top.
76
WINTERKING
“Come along, William,” he said. He looked back at his
wife. Wykeham and Plum joined him silently.
Longford smoothed the paper with the side of his hand.
The map, to Plum’s embarrassment, looked like a drawing for children. Devon and Ohomowauke were marked clearly enough, as were the greater towns and cities to the
south, but not with the orthodox cartographers symbols. For
Bristol Longford had sketched a ridiculous frowning clockface
and for Ohomowauke an owl made of flowers. Devon itself
was a ring on nine towers, black on the land, and quite a bit
larger than the size of the village seemed to warrant. Presumably the wavy lines meandering among them represented the river. There were too many lines, however, and they wandered
confusedly. Longford traced a set of lines with his finger.
“This is the old river,” he said, “the river one can still
see on the government maps of the region. Oddly, the
surveyors weren’t that far off. Quite surprising given their
equipment. Less than a few meters error at any one point.”
He traced the lines again, his finger following a gentler curve
which tracked north from Bristol, bent around Ohomowauke,
then south until in a sinuous line, leaving Devon, it swung
north once m
ore along the far western edge. “But you would
expect,” he added significantly, “at least I did, a common
error.” He paused. “Well, there isn’t.” He gave a furtive
glance at Wykeham, then turned again to the map. “Actually,”
he said, “the error changes rather wildly.”
Wykeham examined the lines carefully. “So you assumed,”
Wykeham said, “that the error was common— because it
should have been— and figured the difference."
“Yes.” Longford looked startled. “Yes, of course.” For the
first time he broke into a grin. “Though, to tell the truth, I
had some sleepless nights before it occurred to me.”
“And the true measurement?”
Longford went on grinning. Indeed he couldn’t help
feeling flattered by the way Wykeham put it. “Yes,” he said,
pleased, “I have made, I think, a number of rather exact
measurements.”
Conscious of disloyalty, Plum turned again to the paper
and found, even against her better judgment, her attention
attracted to the largest of the nine towers scratched on the
hillsides of Devon.
The Hill and the Tower
77
“The channel is straightening,” her husband was saying.
“The bends, I believe, have sharpened.”
She bent over to examine the drawings more closely. At
the base of the tower there was a sort of absurd scribble
which she suspected must have been meant to be thorns.
What an odd thing, she thought.
“All I need,” Longford continued, “is the final measurement."
“Which is from Greenchurch?” Wykeham asked. “From
my hilltop?”
Longford nodded.
“For which you wish my permission to cut down not only
the old trees but the inconvenient new one.”
“Tim, ‘ Plum said, not listening, her eyes riveted on a
small dark square hidden among the crosshatch of lines which
suggested the stonework at the top of the tower. It was hardly
more than a blot, with just a fleck or two of white highlights.
Yet there was a feeling of delicate roundness and a suggestion
. . , though it was silly. “Tim,” she asked, not aware she was
interrupting him, her voice raised more than was necessary.
He broke off and, annoyed with her insistence, turned.