by F. G. Cottam
Crawley had become fascinated by the story of Gregory of Avalon and the legend of the vast wood from which the sorceress he’d vanquished had derived her power. He believed in ghosts and curses, ley lines and other magical properties to do with location; the resonant mystical power of particular places to endure through centuries.
He built a wooden house at Loxley’s Cross. In the pictures Curtis sourced on the Internet, this looked like something between a traditional Swiss or Austrian ski chalet and one of those old-fashioned railway signal boxes from which gates at crossings were opened and closed manually. He fancied himself as an architect, on top of everything else. But Curtis concluded with a wry smile that architecture was something Alfred Crawley hadn’t been very good at.
He’d married by this point and fathered two daughters. When the girls reached the age of six, he decided to build them a maze as a place of recreation. There were some photographs of the maze. They were aerial shots, taken from a hot air balloon.
The first pictures had been taken in the spring of 1862. They showed the maze to be an intricate geometric puzzle covering an area about the size of a cricket square on an English village green. The second pictures had been taken in the summer of the following year and when he saw them, Curtis almost gasped audibly.
In the second set of pictures, the maze covered an area about the size of two football pitches laid side-by-side. Most of its internal space was cast into deep shadow by the angle of the sun. The balloon must have taken flight at some point on a late and clear afternoon. Curtis calculated that the height of the hedgerows from which the maze was composed would be around thirty feet. It wouldn’t be fun to play in confinement like that, he didn’t think. It would be terrifying and, for a child, a nightmare.
The story of the Loxley’s Cross maze had a tragic conclusion. Dismayed by the dimensions to which it had grown, Crawley planned to have it razed and then uprooted and the land it grew on ploughed under and left to lie fallow. The work was scheduled to be carried out in the January of 1864. But before it could be done, his girls wandered into the labyrinth he’d planted and became lost.
By this point they were in the charge of a maid called Amelia, a young local woman Crawley had taken on as a sort of housekeeper-cum-nanny. Their parents were at a dinner in Cardiff where they were booked into a hotel overnight. When they returned they could see no sign of their daughters. Eventually the girls were found, both frozen to death, in one of the false paths of dense and towering privet to which their father’s leafy puzzle had led them.
Crawley had the maze destroyed as planned and demolished the house. He and his wife had left England and re-settled in Canada. They thrived in British Columbia, Rachel Crawley giving birth to a son and another daughter who both, happily, outlived their parents. They seemed to have recovered entirely from the earlier tragedy in Wales. But people had been more resilient then and child mortality far more common. Children died all the time of typhus and diphtheria. Adulthood was not the near certainty in Victorian times that it was in twenty-first-century Britain.
He searched for and eventually found a family group shot from the Loxley’s Cross period that showed a slight, smiling young woman he assumed to be Amelia. She seemed familiar to him, like an actress he might have seen in a film he’d only half watched. She was certainly good-looking enough for films. But she’d been born rather too early for stardom of the celluloid sort.
Curtis took out his wallet and found Carrington’s card. He called the mobile number. Carrington picked up after a few rings. ‘This is Tom Curtis.’
‘Good evening. Enjoy your homework, Mr Curtis?’
‘What happened to Amelia? You sound like you’re in a pub.’
‘That’s because I’m in a pub. She disappeared. She was never seen again.’
‘Can you go and stand outside?’
‘With the smokers, you mean?’
‘I’ll be able to hear you.’
‘I’ll call you back in a moment, Mr Curtis.’
‘Tom.’
‘Very well, Tom, as you wish.’
Carrington called back about a minute and a half later. Time spent draining his pint and having a pee in the gents, Curtis thought.
‘It’s not the whole story, is it, this stuff in the public domain?’
‘Alfred Crawley was an inveterate taker of notes and a compulsive diarist. He compiled an account of the events at Loxley’s Cross. I’m sure he did. I’d stake my reputation on it. But it’s never been found. If it exists, it was deliberately hidden. Had he made the whole story public, he would have been derided as a madman.’
‘He doesn’t seem to have bothered much about what people thought of him.’
‘He would have been lampooned and ostracized and he knew it. He had a streak of exhibitionism but he was no fool. He wouldn’t have wanted his wife publicly shunned. He loved her. Just because he was slightly eccentric doesn’t mean he wasn’t socially aware. He had good reason to keep quiet.’
‘What did happen?’
‘If I told you that over the phone, Tom, you’d consider me a crank.’
‘Try me.’
‘Has the planting begun in earnest yet?’
‘No. The excavation machines are being set up as we speak. The serious work begins tomorrow.’
‘If you restore the Forest of Mourning to its original state you will invite catastrophe, Tom Curtis.’
‘The Forest of Mourning?’
‘Its original name.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I doubt there’s another human being alive who does,’ Carrington said.
‘I know you’re not a crank, Professor, but I can’t just stop this project in its tracks for no reason. If I did, Saul Abercrombie would simply fire me and get someone else to do it. He could do that tonight. The wheels have been set in motion. There’s a woman here already eminently well qualified to supervise the entire job.’
‘What’s the name of this woman?’
‘Frankly, that’s none of your business.’
‘Has nothing struck you as odd while you’ve been there, Mr Curtis?’
Everything has, Curtis thought. But he wasn’t about to share that impression with a semi-retired academic with a belly full of something potent bought from a hand-drawn pump. He said, ‘What would likely strike me as odd? Can you think of anything?’
‘It’s dangerous to restore trees to that domain. Crawley discovered it was so just by planting hedgerows for his children’s maze. He paid an appalling price. Before he left, he took preventative measures.’
‘He did what?
‘He planted something himself that feeds on flora.’
Curtis laughed. He was incredulous. ‘Trees aren’t carnivores, Professor Carrington.’
‘This was a hybrid. It was highly aggressive and essentially parasitic. It was designed to choke the life out of anything that grew there above the height of grass. It would embrace a tree, smother it and starve its surrounding soil of nutrients before it ever matured from a sapling.’
‘It could move around?’
‘It could.’
‘It was a thorn bush, wasn’t it?’
‘Was?’
‘It was a thorn bush with magical properties.’
‘That’s a fanciful way of putting it, Mr Curtis. Crawley believed only in a very practical sort of magic where horticulture was concerned. His thorn bush was a precaution.’
And it had been on its way to Puller’s Reach when they’d destroyed it. It had covered a thousand metres of the journey it was taking to devour the yew they had planted which it had hungrily sensed.
‘We burned the bush at noon today, Professor. We destroyed all trace of it.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘We reduced it to carbon.’
‘We’ll see. Have you planted anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has anything odd occurred in the vicinity of the trees you put in the ground?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a liar, Mr Curtis. And you’re a very poor one.’
‘I think this conversation’s reached its natural conclusion.’
‘There’s nothing natural about the Forest of Mourning, as you’ll discover to your cost.’
‘Goodbye, Professor Carrington.’
‘Do you remember the seduction in Scotland last summer? Do you recall the event that has made you such a willing pawn of your present master? You don’t, do you, Mr Curtis? And there’s a reason your memory of your affair with Isobel Jenks is so vague.’
Curtis broke the connection. He didn’t think he’d heard the last of Andrew Carrington and he thought much of what he’d been told was probably true. But the professor had been wrong in one important particular, he was sure.
He was no scholar. He possessed no detection skills. But he felt certain that at least one other living human being was aware of the forest’s original name. He suspected that Crawley’s account of his time at Loxley’s Cross existed and had been found. Saul Abercrombie had rediscovered it. And Saul, he was bloody sure, had devoured its every page.
EIGHT
They started along the coastline, slightly inland from the edge of the cliffs, a logical method of progression dictated by the need to keep unobstructed the route the stock of trees would take to where they were planted as the forest progressed and grew and flourished.
The machines turned vast swathes of wild grassland into soft and loamy beds for the root systems of mature trees. And the trees came. They arrived from all over Britain, from France and Germany and Italy and Spain, from America and Canada and even from India and Japan.
For Tom Curtis it was a relief to stop thinking about subjects sinister and unknowable and to concentrate fully on what he knew best. He concerned himself with the pH balance of the land; with irrigation and screening for blight and disease and the correct balance between density and the sunlight needed by each separate species for photosynthesis and the best possible chance of growth and prolonged lifespan.
He was obliged to represent Saul Abercrombie in meetings with concerned interest groups. He was obliged to liaise with individuals and organizations worried about the environmental impact and the cultural significance of what they were doing. Most people considered reforestation a good thing, he discovered, even if they were taken aback by the scale of what was to be accomplished.
Curtis could argue that it was fundamentally a job of restoration. But he thought his Welsh ancestry a priceless asset in dealing with some of the more entrenched and conservative groups: those opposed to radical change it seemed to him almost on principle.
Over three or four weeks the workforce quadrupled. The new recruits came from Welsh villages and towns, learning on the job from the core of skilled workers already present. The compound in which they were housed and fed grew correspondingly until to Curtis it resembled the sort of township that might spring up spontaneously in response to an oil strike or a gold-rush a hundred years earlier. Five miles from Abercrombie’s house, eight from the nearest hamlet boasting a post office and a pub, the place developed a frontier atmosphere of nightly carousing and drinking and song.
Curtis left them to it. The work-hard, play-hard philosophy prevailed among the compound’s resident population. Violence or any hint of sex crime he would have cracked down on through Pete Mariner, whose hands-on job it was to liaise with the gangers and foremen on site. But the labour force was content. They were mostly young people being well paid for exhilarating work. Every day there was cause and spectacular effect as the forest spread and strengthened and matured in character in their hands and before their eyes.
None of them had ever witnessed the like. Curtis and his two lieutenants had all worked in Britain planting native broadleaf forests. The work carried out by conventional means followed a pattern, almost a ritual.
The area determined the woodland classification decided by the National Vegetation Communities. A couple of dominant species were decided upon. On Abercrombie’s Pembrokeshire domain that would probably have been lowland ash and oak.
Added to those would be an assortment of smaller tree species: birch, small-leafed lime, field maple, cherry, hornbeam aspen, sweet chestnut, rowan, whitebeam and perhaps willow. Bare root whips were planted, small saplings generally about two years old in a season running from November until March. They would be protected from deer and rabbits by plastic sheaths.
Rides would run between the planted areas, avenues about fifteen metres wide. The area around each planted tree would be kept clear of any weed or fungal growth that might drain the soil of nutrients. Birds and squirrels might seed areas spontaneously, but the whole thing would be managed and planned from inception over patient decades to mature consequence.
‘I didn’t think this was going to work,’ Pete Mariner said, three weeks after the diggers cut their first swathes of Abercrombie’s earth. ‘I’m only daring to say that now because I think I was so wrong.’
He was on the terrace at the house with Dora and Curtis and Francesca, enjoying a brandy in the aftermath of a meal the four of them had shared, Saul Abercrombie absent at a clinic in Harley Street for a procedure all of them had been warned was a secret worthy of keeping.
‘I thought it would be unnatural. I thought it would look unnatural. You know, bogus, like transplanted hair on a bald man’s head. Or artificial, like film set props are artificial.’
‘I had my doubts,’ Francesca said. ‘Not about dad’s commitment, or any of you and your credentials. I just thought it wouldn’t possess its own character, somehow.’
Dora said, ‘In what way? The trees have been perfectly cast for their role. The stock is coming from everywhere. But every species is indigenous.’
‘Did you ever buy an album, Dora? Did you ever buy CDs, back in the olden days?’
‘I’m thirty-seven years old. Of course I did.’
‘Pop? Rock? Indie?’
‘All of those.’
‘And a dash of Goth,’ Pete said.
‘Guilty as charged.’
Francesca said, ‘I thought the forest might be like one of those greatest hits compilations. I feared it might be contrived, characterless, too much of a good thing. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Dora said. ‘I think it’s a great analogy, actually. I also think it’s a scenario we’re avoiding.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Pete said. ‘Tom?’
But Curtis didn’t feel much like drinking to anything on that particular evening. He’d had a rough audit done earlier in the day on a gut feeling he’d had. A helicopter had overflown what they’d done and it had counted more trees than they had put in the ground.
The disparity was substantial. Forests were supposed to grow. But there was growth and growth and this was of a sort for which his experience provided him with no reasonable explanation.
This wasn’t the yews at Puller’s Reach. They had grown in number; there were seven of them at the most recent count. But ‘Freemantle Theory’ had been applied to them. The prevailing suspicion was that the land manager had gone rogue, was living rough somewhere and doing his own planting on the estate.
This had become a slightly callous and rather stale standing joke. But it was convenient in justifying something inexplicable. Where the Puller’s Reach yew copse was small and inexplicable, however, the body of the forest was enormous. And a disparity in volume between what was planted and what was there represented chaos to Curtis and was very bad news indeed.
Their whole methodology on the Abercrombie domain was radical and crude and, if Curtis was honest, distasteful to him. Forestation was a slow and subtle process ordinarily. You colluded with nature, you did not dictate to it with huge machines and an army of labour and halogen floodlights to enable the work to continue relentlessly without pause until you reached a conclusion you were imposing on the land.
He had become conflicted. A part of him was pleased to be busy doin
g what his expertise enabled him to among people with whom he was familiar and for whom he had affection and respect. He was pleased too that there had been no setbacks to have to deal with. Mechanically, biologically, politically and people-wise, the project was running smoothly and to schedule.
But on a fundamental level he didn’t like what they were doing. When you walked through the land they’d reforested it was cool and serene and shaded and offered no hint of how recent it was or how dramatic had been the process by which it came into existence. It felt not just established and not even old, but ancient in character. It was not, though, a happy place. If it felt authentic, it also felt gloomy and imposed a brooding mood of isolation when you crept through its dark, quiet and ever-growing immensity.
How to explain the disparity between what they’d planted and what was flourishing in the re-born Forest of Mourning? He couldn’t. He decided he would not yet mention it to the others. They were buoyed up, ebullient. He would make no mention of it until he could find an explanation for it. Freemantle Theory didn’t begin to do that.
‘I’m going to turn in,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ Pete said, ‘Busy day tomorrow.’
‘They’re all busy days,’ Curtis said, smiling and nodding a goodnight to the two women they were leaving behind at the table they’d shared.
‘Once upon a time,’ Dora said after they’d gone, ‘common courtesy would have insisted they remain until we were ready to retire.’
‘I like their attitude,’ Francesca said. ‘I can’t stand the sort of man who treats every woman as a date. They see us as colleagues and nothing more. It’s refreshing.’
‘I think Pete sees you as more than a colleague, Francesca. At least, potentially.’
‘And you’d like to go to bed with Tom. And Tom has no doubt thought about what it would be like to go to bed with you. But that isn’t going to happen, I don’t think.’