Sandlands by Rosy Thornton Read Free Book Online

was struck by the bell’s date. Odd to think that while the King stood trial for his life at Westminster Hall, craftsmen in a Suffolk field went calmly on with their appointed task, making bells to call the impervious faithful of the fledgling Commonwealth to prayer. Strange how – give or take a few witches – things must have gone on much the same. Jack’s bell, she supposed, would have rung for the execution and again for the Restoration, as for the changing Christian seasons, the births and marriages and deaths of the parish, the old year and the new, for more than three centuries since.
    The field was no longer old Jack’s as it had once been, along with Silly Hill and all the land beyond the church and down towards Stone Common, but had been sold as a lot to the Bradcocks, who worked it with their farm at Campsea Ashe. He’d been forced to retire from both bellrope and farming, first by arthritis in his shoulder and then by something more invasive and deeper in. After more than three years now he’d admit it was his kidneys, but still never called it cancer.
    Â 
    It was three minutes past seven when Danny came jogging up the stairs and almost five past when Liam eventually appeared, his apology shrivelling under Willie’s glittery stare.
    â€˜Right.’ The tower captain moved to his rope, and they all followed suit. ‘We’ll start in rounds, and let’s have no lumping. Make it good and even for his nibs.’
    His nibs was Air Vice-Marshal Fitzpatrick, the church’s nearest neighbour at the Yews, and who owned Church Cottage too. No campanologist himself, he was still a fierce critic of the art.
    Jack eased her bell up to the balance. The fourth was set very shallow, and it only took a nudge to free headstock and stay from the wooden slider.
    â€˜Look to,’ said Willie. ‘Treble’s going – she’s gone.’
    It was quite good, tonight. Liam, who had a tendency to let his number three bell get on top of Jack’s, kept things tolerably even, and by the final few rounds, before Willie told them, ‘That’s all,’ and signalled for them to set, their spacing was pretty well perfect.
    â€˜Not bad,’ he said – high praise indeed from Willie Woolnough.
    Â 
    Old Jack had kept a dairy herd but never a dog, so he brought in the cows for milking with his Land Rover. Never a collie, that is. He had only old Fern, a spaniel and a stickler for demarcation: a flusher of pheasant, not a rounder-up of stock. She bestrode the passenger seat with front paws on the dashboard and watched operations with the fervent pleasure of a sports fan. When Jack was small, the old man had let her steer the Land Rover, cresting the ancient ridges and furrows like a galleon in full sail. Perched on his bony lap, her legs in any case too short to reach the pedals, she threw the wheel now left now right to head off any beast which broke from the pack, stiff-gaited, a parody of stupid, roll-eyed terror.
    There was no money these days in dairying, according to Mr Bradcock, unless on an industrial scale. After four human generations and many more bovine ones, the Deeks herd had been broken up and sent for auction, while Bellpit Field was ploughed and put to barley.
    â€˜People still want beer,’ Mr Bradcock said.
    There was no Deeks to take over in any case. Old Jack had had no children of his own, which Mum always said was a crying shame. His wife, Mary, had contracted an infection delivering their only, stillborn, child. ‘I turned the bell for the babe, and for Mary eight days later,’ he’d once told her, like a line from an old, sad story.
    She’d always liked the sad ones best. ‘Tell me about the town that drowned,’ she would demand, and he’d stroke the hair from her forehead with the ball of his scratchy farmer’s thumb and relate the tale of Dunwich that was swallowed by the sea, with its eight submerged