The cottages were behind him, and ahead lay Wayland’s Smithy in a copse of beech trees. He could make it out clearly, an arrangement of great stones that encompassed a small space with a narrow opening. It had probably been a Stone Age tomb, not a blacksmith’s shop. Still, legend maintained that if a man left his horse there overnight to be shod, and a coin to pay for the work, the animal would be waiting for him in the morning. More likely, local smiths had discovered a way to expand their trade. For centuries fire and those who used it to work metal were held in high regard, and sometimes feared as well.
A few miles along, he found a small inn by the road, lorries in the yard and a motorcar or two as well.
He stopped to ask if they were serving at this hour, and inside saw a pot of tea standing on a small table near the door, a stack of mugs beside it, sugar and a pitcher of lukewarm milk just behind it.
He poured himself a cup, wandered into the tiny reception area, and sat down by the window overlooking the road.
It was two hours later that he opened his eyes again.
A woman was clearing away the tea things, and she smiled as he stirred and then straightened up in his chair.
“You’re not the first to nod off in that chair,” she said, her eyes merry, “nor the last. That your motorcar by the lilacs?”
“I’m afraid so. When do you begin serving breakfast?”
“Lord love you, we closed the kitchen more than an hour ago. Most of the lorry drivers have moved on. I’d have thought their racket would’ve wakened the dead.”
“Not this dead,” he said, standing and stretching his shoulders. “Do you by any chance have rooms here?”
“We keep a half-dozen beds for travelers. Clean sheets and good food, as well as good cheer. That’s what we offer. And all we offer.” She considered him. “It’s not very posh—”
Rutledge smiled. “Still, I’d like a room for tonight, if you have one. I’m here to see the horse.”
“Oh, yes? It’s early for the day-trippers, but I expect you aren’t the usual visitor. What are you, then?”
Her face was red with the morning’s rush, her hair pinned back out of her way, and her clothing sober, as if she worked hard and had no time to worry about how she looked.
He hadn’t been prepared to deal with questions of this sort.
“I was tired of London, and I drove all night.” Following her into the dining room, he added, “I needed to see something besides walls and pavement and people.”
“Disappointed in love, are you?”
He was on the point of vigorously denying it when he realized that she was teasing him. And he must have looked the picture of the rejected lover, unshaven, his clothes unpressed, his face marked with fatigue.
“No. Foolish in the extreme.”
She laughed. “Sit down over there in the corner—that cloth’s clean—and I’ll bring you whatever’s left from breakfast. There’s usually cold bacon, bread, and hard-boiled eggs in the cupboard. There’s coffee as well as tea. Some of the lorry drivers prefer it to keep them awake.”
“I’ll stay with tea.”
When she brought his plate it was large as a charger, and as promised there were rashers of bacon, eggs, toasted bread, and pots of butter and jam. Rutledge thanked her and added, “I’ve just come past those cottages not far from the spot where you can look up and see the White Horse. Odd place to put them, I should think, unless they’re intended for viewers to stop in.” He couldn’t remember seeing them there when he’d come to Uffington as a boy, but then the horse had been all that mattered, firing his imagination.
“Well, I hope you’re not thinking of wanting one. They’re taken, the lot of them. They were put up near the beginning of the late Queen’s reign, leper houses they were. But no lepers came, and then they were let to anyone who was willing to live there. The local people don’t much care for them, but there’s no dearth of people who do.”
“Why leper houses? Was leprosy a problem here?”
She paused on her way back to the kitchen. “It was a Miss Tomlin, they say, who was set on them, having been a missionary and seen her share of suffering. And there’s a leper in the Bible, you know. I expect that was what put her in mind of doing something for them. She sold off another parcel of land her grandfather had left her and sent for a builder to make cottages where the poor things could live without being tormented. But she never found any ‘children of God’ as she called them, and she died not long after.”
“At least she cared enough to try.”
“Well, there’s that, I expect. Or a guilty conscience. The fact is, she could have done more good with her money in other directions, in my opinion. A touch of the sun, it’s what my granddad always said. Too much sun and too long in heathen lands. She’d lost sight of what truly needed doing in England. And I’ve dishes to see to. My husband’s gone to market, and the girl who dries for me has a bad thumb, so I’m on my own. Give me half an hour, and there’ll be a room for you.”
She was gone, leaving him to the hearty breakfast.
Afterward she showed him to a small room that seemed Lilliputian, and he remembered the young man on the road. He’d have played the very devil getting himself into this box, he thought.
And the cramped space sent his claustrophobia reeling. The first order of business was to open the only window, which looked out on the road. He stood there breathing in the morning air and fighting an urge to run back down the stairs after Mrs. Smith, begging for something larger. But there weren’t any larger rooms, given the size of the building.
Fatigue overtook him after a few minutes, and he lay down on the narrow bed, asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. The fragrance of sun-dried sheets folded with lavender was the last thing he remembered.
It was late morning when he drove back to the White Horse and climbed the hill. His legs were longer than they had been at age nine, and he made short work of it now. As a child he’d huffed and puffed in his father’s wake, trying to keep pace but stumbling as he tried to see everything at once.
Hamish, unhappy with this heathen horse, kept him company with a vigorous objection to having any part of it.
When one stood on the crest of the hill looking down at the figure, it was difficult to pick out what the expanse of white chalk represented. Aware of what the design was, it was possible to identify the flowing tail, the legs stretched in a gallop, the reared head. But the ancient people who had cut the turf here to create the figure must have had someone standing on the ground below, guiding them.
As, he realized, someone was standing now, looking up at him.
He began to walk back the way he’d come, and the man stayed where he was. It wasn’t the young giant from early this morning, but an older man with gray in his hair and a lined face. His eyes, when Rutledge was near enough to see them, were brown but the whites were yellow.
Malaria.
Rutledge had seen troops from the Commonwealth, especially India, with just such yellowing.
“Good morning,” he said to the man, for all the world a traveler taken with the local sight. “It’s quite a piece of work, isn’t it? I expect it was dug with wooden mattocks or antler horn. I wonder how long it took to create the full figure.”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know a damned thing about it. And care less. Is that what brought you here, the horse?”
Warily, Rutledge said, “Should there be another reason?”
“Well, Partridge has gone missing again. There’s generally someone from London looking in on him or waiting for him to come back when he’s on one of his walkabouts.”
It was an Australian term, and the man seemed to use it as if from habit.