“Okay?” Kingston enlarged his grin.
“Yes.” Latimer slipped out of his English summer jacket, hanging it casually over his shoulder. “Fine.” God! he thought. Not fine—had Lieutenant Marmaduke Arthur St John really served the guns on Delhi Ridge, to breach the Red Fort, while battered by this sort of ridiculous heat? “Fine.”
“Okay.” Kingston gave him an old-fashioned look, as though reading his thoughts, and at the same time estimating his ability to withstand high summer in Georgia. “’Bout an hour, say? Meet you here, same place?”
“Very well.” If Lieutenant Marmaduke Arthur St John could fight, then Oliver St John Latimer could walk—that was the least he could do. “About an hour, then.”
“Fine.” Kingston echoed the word cautiously. “But … now, don’t you go off the path—right?”
Latimer looked at him, askance. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t mean nothing, really. But there’s mebbe some old snakes in there, off the path … But they won’t do you no harm … But there’s poison ivy—an’ sumac—an’ you don’t want to take hold of that … Like, mebbe you wouldn’t want to take hold of stinging nettles in England, huh?”
Latimer glanced at the forest. “What d’you mean?”
Kingston shrugged, still smiling. “Jus’ keep to the path that’s all.” Another shrug. “Jus’ remember—this is Georgia, not Hertford-shire … okay?” Suddenly his expression clouded, and he gestured towards the woods. “What I mean is … if you’re not used to it, that poison ivy’ll sting you—that’s all … So don’t think you’re back home, is what I mean—huh?”
Latimer tore himself away from the innocent-looking forest. Stinging nettles were fair enough—they were a well-remembered minor childhood hazard … but snakes—
“What sort of snakes?” He had to conceal his gibbering irrational fear under what he hoped sounded like a casual inquiry: Kingston would assuredly make a meal of the cowardly truth. “Poisonous ones?”
“There’s some are. Big ol’ rattler now—you leave him alone.” The innumerable white teeth flashed. “The Professor … he got a big ol’ black snake I seen near the okra patch, in the veg’table garden back at the house—he won’t do no harm … Man, you jus’ got to watch where you put your feet, that’s all … Hell—I remember, when I was boy, way down south from here, after we left Jamaica … I was out in the swamp, catchin’ frogs with a flashlight—I caught myself a water moccasin—a cottonmouth—instead …” Kingston chuckled at the hideous memory “… jus’ behind the head I ketched him. An’ he wound himself all around my arm … I had to unwind him an’ throw him—an’ I can tell you I throwed him clear out of the swamp!”
“Indeed?” If the man was setting out to terrify him, he was doing rather well, thought Latimer bitterly.
“But that was my fault, you see,” confided Kingston. “He was only out there catchin’ frogs—jus’ like me—” he looked at his watch quickly “—Hell! I got to go … You jus’ keep to the path, Oliver—an’ keep the creek on your right goin’, an’ on your left comin’ back—an’ you’ll be jus’ fine … An’ I’ll be waitin’ here for you … ’Cause I’m fixin’ to cook you a real Southern Supper this even’—all dipped in corn-meal an’ fried in hog-lard in a black iron skillet … An’ you’re gonna like that jus’ fine—’cause that’ll be real soul-food!”
Latimer watched Fat Albert disappear in a haze of blue exhaust-smoke, and with mixed feelings. He had the feeling that the negro had been mocking him with hog-lard, which made him feel decidedly queasy, and … snakes … which made him feel queasier still. But he couldn’t be sure.
He sighed, and turned back down the road, to look for the path into Sion. Two things he could be sure of, there were: he felt absurdly lonely, and before long he would feel extremely hot. In fact, he wished now, and very heartily, that he had not allowed himself to be so easily talked into this expedition, when he could so easily have pleaded jet-lag.
He eyed the woods doubtfully. He could find the path, and walk along it for a few yards to some safe clearing, and sit down for an hour. But that would not help him escape this ridiculous heat, which seemed already to thicken the very air in which he moved: not even that memorable heat-wave in Rome in ’72, when David Audley had so nearly over-reached himself, had been like this … And he had been a dozen years younger then.
But … to yield to that temptation woud be to expose himself to his own self-contempt, which was as inescapable as the heat itself. With that as the alternative there was no choice left, even though this was not so much a sweating temperature for Fattypuffs as a melting one: better to walk and melt, testing himself against that hallowed St John battle honour of Delhi Ridge …
He walked.
It really wasn’t so very different from some anonymous side-road in the anonymous English midlands—except for the cicadas loudly doing whatever it was they did.
And except for the heat.
There was a path—
There was also a fence, complete with barbed-wire. But someone had uprooted it here, and trampled it down, and the path beyond was tolerably well-trodden.
He looked at his watch, and decided to play it down the line, for self-respect’s sake: he would walk for half an hour, as far as he could, and would then turn around and walk back—to Kingston, and to whatever it was that Kingston purposed to dip in corn-meal and fry in hog-lard, however revolting that sounded.
He negotiated the fallen wire and started walking.
A few yards in he remembered snakes, and found himself a fallen branch for protection, just in case Kingston hadn’t been kidding him.
Through the trees, turning in a belated attempt to memorize his route, he caught a glimpse of the little white church, away behind him on his right now, which had been on the highest point of the ridge above the wooden bridge when he had crossed yesterday—Sion Crossing and Sion Church … “We on old Sion land now” …
He walked on a short distance, but when he turned again to look back the white spire was already lost from view among the trees. This surprised him a little, because the woodland around him was not really dense, with its spindly younger saplings struggling haphazardly between the more mature trees.
He had always liked trees. Once upon a time, in the days of hope, he had even learnt about them in an amateurish way with suburban enthusiasm: autumn in Oxford, in the Parks and Mesopotamia and the Botanic Gardens—and in Broad Walk before Dutch Elm disease—had been unforgettable, and autumn had been his favourite time of all.
He looked around. Whatever the ridge had been like then, in Sion Crossing’s age of elegance, all this had grown up naturally over long years: it was probably what the experts called “climax forest”, the stabilized terminal growth which the landscape supported when untouched by man, which only such natural agencies as fire and storm could substantially change. And it was like, and yet not like, any such wood in faraway England: there were trees he thought he recognized—a walnut there—and others he almost recognized—there were several varieties of oak, but no English oaks … and some he could only guess at—was that the famous hickory, only imported into Europe … and that, so much less spectacular … dogwood, maybe?
For a moment he was tempted to investigate one of the larger and more unfamiliar trees, but then he noticed the ivy and vine-like creepers which crawled over the forest floor and climbed the tree. The ivy looked innocent enough, and probably was innocent; and the vine-like thing might even be the Scuppernong of which he had read somewhere, which produced the native American grapes … but …
Anyway, regardless of poisonous snakes—and there were probably none of them within miles of him: they were more likely Kingston’s little joke, designed to prevent him getting lost by keeping him to the path—regardless of such hazards, he had no time for natural history. It was history-book history he was supposed to be smelling out here, on old Sion land.
He paused again, arrested partly by the sudden fear of getting l
ost in this wilderness, and partly by an irritating feeling of inadequacy. But, of course, he couldn’t really get lost: there was the path, ahead of him and behind him, and all he had to do was keep to it; besides which, although the woods hemmed him in, the land to his right did seem to fall away quite steeply now, presumably to the creek far below which had once been old Sion land’s boundary on this side of the plantation.
No … he couldn’t get lost here and now, on this path with the creek to his right, in 1984. But in 1864 …
He stood stock-still, almost wanting to hear some sound, no matter how far distant, to remind him that it was 1984, not 1864. But the woods were utterly silent, without a breath of wind, as though held by the heat. And the silence and the heat together only combined to remind him that nothing whatsoever had happened here since then until now, while the world outside had changed beyond all recognition.
He shivered at the idea, and was at once fascinated by that phenomenon: that it was possible to be hot and sweaty on the outside and yet cold somewhere deep inside, like a chef’s Bombe Surprise—
He shook his head at the ridiculous analogy, and started to walk again. It was an age since he’d tucked into a Bombe Surprise—and he wasn’t even hungry for once, although he ought to be—but such unlikely fantasies suggested to him that the flight had confused his time-clock, leaving him light-headed and susceptible to foolish notions.
He looked again at his watch, trying to estimate time against distance, and was disappointed that so few minutes had passed since he had left the road. He could hardly turn round yet, to retrace his steps, without having found … whatever there was to find, which had once been the beating heart of the great Sion Crossing plantation. And his own self-respect (apart from Kingston’s likely scorn) ruled that out, anyway. Better by far to go on, and make Kingston wait, than to turn back prematurely and admit failure.
And yet … what was he looking for?
He came back to that irritating sense of inadequacy. It would look well enough in his report to Senator Cookridge to minute some facile window-dressing aside … “With regard to the actual location of these events, I have examined the terrain, between Sion Church and the site of the Sion Crossing house—”. But how would that advance his final recommendation? Because, after all, that recommendation would be made solely from the documents and hypotheses which Lucy Cookridge’s father—real father—had amassed, which had nothing to do with this tangled woodland.
He stopped again, and looked around, helplessly aware that he hadn’t the first idea of how to conduct a treasure-hunt. No doubt Audley would have known how to do that—
Damn it to hell! That was his own fault: it was Audley who should have been here, and he only had himself to blame for having twisted that well-laid plan out of true!
He felt the sweat prickle under his shirt. Regardless of his error of judgement, Audley wasn’t here, but he was. And, regardless of crude technicalities, he was Audley’s equal in the rational assessment of information any day of the week—that was what he had built on. Even … even without Audley’s special advantages, he could do better than Audley—right?
Right!
So … he had not come far enough—so he would go further until he had at least sorted out in his own mind what he was supposed to be doing here—even, however annoying the thought might be, what Audley himself might have been doing, which Lucy Cookridge took for granted.
Of course, there was nothing really to see. And even if he found the ruins of the old Sion Crossing great house there would still be nothing to see of the slightest value. He had heard ersatz historians, like young Mitchell, speak of their great battlefields lovingly, as though the horrors which fascinated them were still eloquently there. But the truth was that time very quickly restored the bloodiest field to innocence, even if the world had been changed on it. He had himself raced over young Mitchell’s dreadful stamping grounds along the motorway to Paris, travelling in minutes over the boring farmland which the bravest of the brave had taken years to cross; and he had watched French children splash and paddle happily between high tide and low tide on the Normandy sands where the sons of Mitchell’s soldiers—and the great-grandsons of Lucy Cookridge’s father’s soldiers, Union and Confederate—had also splashed and paddled and died, leaving not the slightest mark.
It was all an illusion, this—a pointless return to the scene of the crime—a fraud perpetrated by military historians to pad their expense accounts and their tax returns: the truth of then did not exist now, on the ground, but only in the carefully sifted records, cross-checked and treble-checked and critically analyzed, and the expertly-interpreted photographs. The truth was always there, somewhere, for those who had eyes to see and knowledge to understand—the truth was there even in default, crying out by its very absence: that was how he, Oliver St John Latimer (and not David Audley), had first identified, and then broken, the KGB’s Vengeful operation, by God!
He started to walk again.
There was no rational reason to be here except that it was the done historical thing: to recreate the then one self-indulged oneself for form’s sake (and to inflate expenses) by pretending to consult the now before coming to a decision—
Or, in this case, before consulting the practical treasure-hunting experts, with all their gadgets, about the economics of sweeping this climax-forest wilderness for what first-rate research and logical deduction suggested might still be planted between Sion Church and the Sion Crossing house.
Might?
Latimer frowned at another unidentifiable tree. For a man of Senator Cookridge’s wealth the treasure-hunting game was plainly not worth the effort, never mind the curiosity-value of the headlines … for he had no need of publicity. But if he was bent on indulging his step-daughter, then the self-indulgence of the rich and powerful was its own justification … and the lesser mortals who pandered to it took their profit from that gratification, as he was doing now.
But that only brought him back to the original problem: somehow he had to play this silly historical game, although the wilderness was still only a wilderness, which looked for all the world as though nothing had ever happened in it beyond the natural cycle of the seasons, endlessly repeated.
He slowed suddenly, at first hardly knowing why in the continuing silence; and then, almost to his surprise, he found himself reading what must be his own thoughts, though they had an oddly external feeling, as though they had come from outside him.
He halted, and began to listen to the silence.
It seemed to him that, although appearances were truth, appearances were also deceptive. For it was not true that nothing had ever happened here: men had fought here, long ago … all those years ago … very young men mostly—Sherman’s Iowa farmboys and the Georgia farmboys of the Wolfskin Rifles, teenagers with a stiffening of veterans—transformed by their different uniforms into victorious invaders far from home and angry defenders who had seen their homes burning … they had stalked and killed each other in these very woods, in the same heat, long ago. And although their fighting had not been of the slightest importance in any wider scheme of things—a mere footnote to a footnote, far less important in history than the fate of Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara was in fiction—for the dead, Sion Crossing had been a greater battle than Gettysburg and Waterloo, than Bosworth Field or Bunker Hill—
Was that what he was really thinking? Or was there something else inside his mind, in a corner he couldn’t quite reach—?
He wiped his palm across his sweaty brow, and shook his head to clear it. Whatever it was—it was foolishness, mere light-headed imagination!
He looked at his watch again. Twenty-seven minutes—in three minutes he would have won his own release, no matter what that negro said.
He drew a long breath. And no matter what Kingston said, it didn’t matter: he didn’t like these woods, and would be glad to be out of them. For, although they were just woods, they were too quiet and too lonely, and too far from home.
&
nbsp; He looked ahead.
Nothing—trees—
Then he frowned.
Damn, damn, damn—there was something—something not a tree, high up there on his left, ahead, glimpsed through the trees: another step might have concealed it … but he had not taken that step, and could not unsee it now, it was there, and it was not a tree—
Unwillingly he went forward to confirm the bad news.
Not a tree … but a chimney-stack—?
Another dozen steps set the matter beyond doubt: it was a chimney-stack; or that was what it had once been, for, with no house around it, it stood deceptively taller, like an ivy-coloured obelisk in brick set in the midst of an irregular collection of mounds the shapes of which were equally blurred by ivy.
The path skirted the mounds. And there, less obvious, was the overgrown stump of another chimney, with some of its fallen fragments still visible at its base.
He had come to the Sion Crossing great house at last.
And this, of course, was always how it was with great burnings: the fire stripped away the body of the building, the higher debris bringing down weakened walls to leave the more solid chimneys, which had not only been built stronger for their height but were by nature fire-resistant. Indeed, the rest of the house might have been all wood, the most abundant material available—he could remember now having glimpsed white-painted wooden houses yesterday, some of them even substantial enough to boast two-storey columns at their porches.
But there were no fallen columns here, that he could see … except that this must be the back of the house—?
He turned towards the creek. Only a few yards, and then the ridge fell away steeply: without the trees there might well have been a splendid view from here, down and across the valley, in the great days of Sion Crossing … with the lawns and a tree-lined avenue sweeping up to a neo-classical columned front—a front on the far side like Ashley Wilkes’s Fair Oaks?
Belatedly, he remembered Lucy Cookridge’s sketch-map, which he had stuffed into his pocket back in the study.
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