Ferney by James Long Read Free Book Online

crossed the space to where Ferney sat and Mike went forward too, struck by the alarm on her face.
    Tears were rolling down Ferney’s cheeks.
    ‘You knew, you knew,’ he said in an old, cracked voice full of acutely painful joy, then before they could do anything he was up and away through the gate as if it was all too much
to bear.
    ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Gally cried, turning to Mike in pain, and neither of them recognized her voice.
    The village of Penselwood defies all attempts to know it quickly. It sprawls on spidery lanes across the southern end of a steep ridge that runs north for three or four miles.
To the south and west the land is much lower. To the east the chalk starts in waves and folds that lead, in three hours’ walking, to the edge of Salisbury Plain. Anyone relying on a map would
look for the village centre at the church, from where six lanes radiate, but they would be disappointed by the open vacancy of that place. Much of the village lies along the lanes that run south
and east from the church, but the houses are spread out so that they rarely form anything like a quorum.
    The spirit of the village is on the prow of the ridge. To feel a full sense of it, it is necessary to ignore roads and walk up through the tiny, intricate fields, Clover Ground, Sadlers Mead or
Three Cornered Ground, to the pinnacle in the centre of a triangle of lanes that provides the best viewpoint. Behind and to the south, the flat land is the sea on which the ridge sails. Looking
north, the low church tower marks the start of the woodland that covers the narrowing ridge, while the ground falls in scooped combes to the River Stour in the east. The roofs of houses show up
here and there in little huddles along the lanes, too individual to want any closer association. Even the new houses have followed that rule and failed to shift the diffuse centre of gravity in any
one particular direction. No planner has dared to impose modernity on the village on the ridge.
    Ferney had gone too fast and his hip was hurting again as he sat down, heart hammering after the long climb, but none of it mattered, not one bit. The sun came bursting out
from behind a cloud, painting the hill bright green, a mirror of the exultant joy roaring and bubbling up through his chest. Everything had changed, years of loneliness – the longest years he
could ever remember – swept away. There was no longer any question of wishful thinking. Hope had been restored. There was work ahead, it was true, and it might not be easy, but the house was
going to live again and so was he. It wasn’t as if there was any choice. There’d been an agreement made.
    He sat on his stone right at the top of the hill, a stone worn smooth by countless bottoms over countless years. He looked out over a familiar landscape, south to Milton and the roofs of
Gillingham with the old fortress loom of high Shaftesbury rising in the far distance, miles beyond. A trace of the steamy mist of late spring rose from the fields, thickest along the course of the
River Stour, winding down to Marnhull. From the main road, half a mile down the slope, invisible below its curve, modern noise intruded in a steady drone of cars, backed by the basso profundo of
the lorries and the occasional ascending tenor of a hard-driven motorcycle.
    In 1927 the horse chestnut tree had fallen in a summer gale, the great tree that had stood fifty yards below and to the right. He pictured it, lying there in a sprawl of green summer foliage,
then let the image of its leaves turn brown and watched them fall; 1928, the tree dried out, grey branches still attached; then 1929, after the men with the saws had been, just a trunk. In another
world the main road still threw hot noise, but Ferney had a firm hold now and it couldn’t reach him. He lifted his head from the ghost of the wrecked tree and let his gaze wander across the
landscape, changing, tuning. The pylons in the valley flicked out, the