The sound came from behind him—above and behind him, in the undergrowth which hemmed in the edge of the bailey ditch, at its Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State junction with the motte ditch (if this really was a genuine motte-and-bailey earthwork castle, he thought pedantically)—and he accepted that it had to be Willy, because the motte ditch was all thorn-bushes and brambles, even worse than the tangle above him, from which Ranulf might once have defied the might of King Stephen (or maybe the Empress Matilda, according to which side he’d been on at the time) —
So he would have to apologize to Willy (Willy would never give him the benefit of the doubt, after that last unfortunate slip on the edge of the moat at Sulhampstead, which had not really been his fault—but poor old Willy)—
But it wasn’t Willy: it was—he dropped his pencil as he stuffed the sketch-map into the back-pocket of his jeans, and automatically reached down to find it, but then stopped just as automatically in mid-fumble, half in nothing more than surprise, but then half in momentarily irrational fear, at the glimpse of a uniform.
Then the fear was subsumed by self-contemptuous irritation with himself, for letting the sight of an ordinary British policeman frighten him—not a Mister-Plod-PC-49 fatherly copper in the dear old high helmet admittedly, with red face and button nose and bicycle-clipped trousers, but a young copper in a flat cap, and no older than himself; yet a young copper who seemed just as surprised at the sight of him, and who was even now more concerned with extricating himself from the trailing bramble-sucker from last year’s blackberry growth which had snagged his uniform.
The trouble is, he justified to himself quickly, I have met too many Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State other sorts of policemen, of the shoot-first and who-cares? variety, these last two years, and that’s a fact! But the conditioned reflex was still nonetheless strong enough to make him pick up the stub of pencil slowly, and to hold it up between thumb and forefinger for inspection, complete with an ingratiating smile, as he straightened up in slow motion to match the gesture, as if to say:
‘ Don’t shoot, officer! This is just me—Tom Arkenshaw… And this is just my stub of pencil—not a grenade or a pistol!
But the young policeman only stamped down on the ensnaring blackberry thorns, innocently oblivious of his gestures of submission; which gave him time to come fully to his British senses, to wonder aggressively what’s a bloody copper doing here, sneaking up on me on the edge of old Ranulf’s ditch?
One final trample. And then the young policeman sucked his finger, where a thorn had caught it, before looking down at him again. But it was a damned hostile, suspicious look all the same, thought Tom.
‘What are you after, down here?’ The policeman frowned at his finger again, and then gave it another suck.
Tom’s hackles rose. This was old Ranulf’s ditch, or near enough—
not somewhere beyond the Green Line in Beirut, or a poxy Third World slum within mortar-range of a British consulate. But then he thought maybe I’m trespassing—? But there were no peasants in these coverts, so far south of Watford Gap, surely?
‘What—?’ Caution inclined him towards a show of ignorance, to probe the question further, before he pulled rank and privilege. But then a crunching-and-crashing sound, emanating from the floor of Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State the ditch, away to his right, diverted the policeman’s attention.
Other sounds accompanied the crunching-and-crashing, which Tom could guess at, but which he didn’t want to interpret as he bent down to look for their source and prepare for the emergence of their author.
‘What’s that, down there?’ The policeman assumed—assumed all too correctly—that whatever Tom was ‘after’ was related to the sounds.
Tom peered uneasily into the tangle. At the very lowest point of the ditch, which was probably all of six feet higher with in-fill than when Ranulf had forced the local peasantry to dig it, there was something like a tunnel. But, although it might be sufficient for the local fauna— foxes for sure… and maybe even badgers, if there were still badgers unpersecuted here—it was hardly enough for Willy, surely—? Because, for one thing, it was muddy—
‘Have you seen a gentleman hereabouts?’ inquired the policeman, obviously despairing of any other answer, and not expecting it to issue from the bottom of the ditch, anyway.
It was Willy: Tom’s ear, attuned to the worst, caught a word—two words, more precisely—from the other sounds which marked Willy’s passage, exactly according to his orders, with two-yard measuring pole in hand.
Tom turned towards the policeman. Perhaps it was just as well that he had a policeman in attendance, he decided. So the important thing now was to keep the man in attendance, to protect him from physical assault.
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State The crashing became louder, and the words—good old Anglo-Saxon words, echoing the sentiments of the original ditch-diggers
—became clearer.
‘Eh?’ He encouraged the policeman to repeat the question.
‘Have-you-seen—’ The policeman took him in with a despairing glance ‘—a-gentleman—a -gentleman— round-here?’
‘No,’ said Tom truthfully. ‘Why?’
The direct question, following the direct answer, was just the right one for the situation, Tom decided. Because it detained the policeman for another moment; and, if Willy didn’t arrive in a moment after that, he could always try the next question—a good late Medieval question, which had been John Ball’s question—
When Adam delved, and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?
‘You haven’t seen anyone?’ Now the poor devil was caught between the suspicion that he had an awkward customer on his hands and the final arresting vision of Willy’s emergence backwards from the thorn-and-blackberry tangle; and the adjective was strictly accurate rather than Freudian, because Willy’s designer-jeans-encased backside was without doubt a vision sufficient to divert any man from his proper duty, thought Tom.
‘Only her,’ he answered again truthfully, but this time more doubtfully, as he observed the condition of the jeans.
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State
‘ Seventy-six—’ She still held the measuring pole in her hand as she broke free from the tunnel ‘— seventy-seven—’
But that wasn’t the whole circumference of the castle mound, thought Tom quickly. He had taken the longer line of the bailey ditch in all innocence, not knowing about the tangle on the far side of the mound which she must have had to fight her way through, which had left him time to measure that part of the mound’s circumference which fitted into the bailey. So that meant 77 plus 25, multiplied by six. Which meant that Ranulf’s castle was slightly bigger than Topcliffe, but not significantly so; which might mean that Ranulf had been building under the pressure of hot civil war, where William’s man in Yorkshire eighty years earlier would have been throwing up his defences against the sullen pressure of a largely unconquered but disorganized and leaderless Anglo-Saxon population. So that evened things up. But… but, at the same time, it firmed up his theory that this couldn’t actually be Ranulf’s headquarters in Sussex. Or… if it was his HQ, then that might mean