“We smashed him up, that we did,” he shouted. “He won’t do no more witching now. Thankee, missy — I’ll fetch your spade back in half an hour. You done a good morning’s work, you have.”
He stumped out, too drunk to notice how white Margaret had turned, or how she reeled and hugged the well-pump to keep herself from falling. When the whole hillside and valley had stopped sloping around she found Aunt Anne standing anxious beside her.
“You’d best be away for a few hours, Marge,” she said. “If I gave you a pot of damson cheese you could ride over to Cousin Mary’s in the Vale. I should have sent it weeks back, but it slipped my mind. I’ll pack you up a bit of bread and bacon, too, for your dinner. Mr. Gordon’s sure to come round talking to Uncle Peter then, so you’d much best be somewhere else.”
“Oh, thank you, Aunt Anne. I’ll get Scrub ready.”
Twenty minutes later Margaret was clear of the village, riding sidesaddle as she always did. She’d waved to old Mr. Sampson digging his cabbage patch by the almshouses; she’d craned over the Dower House wall to see the yew trees all clipped into shapes of animals; she had sniffed the thymy air as they came out of the woods, and leaned right down over Scrub’s mane as the pony took the steep bank up the common grazing ground below the Beacon; it was just like any of a hundred other rides, hill and valley exactly the same as they’d always been, as though nothing had happened to change her world four days ago.
Scrub was skittish and restless with lack of exercise, tossing his head sideways and up as though he wanted to get a better grip of the bit; so she let him canter all the way up the steady slope to the corner of the cemetery, where no one had been buried since the Changes came because people preferred to be buried in the churchyard even if it meant jostling the bones of long-dead generations. As they swept round the corner they hurtled into the middle of a swirling and squawking white riot — they’d gone full tilt into the flock of village geese. Scrub reared and skittered sideways with an awkward bouncy motion, but Margaret had had half a second to see what was going to happen, so she gripped the pommel of her saddle tightly, allowed him a few moments to be stupid (he knew all about geese, really) and then reined him firmly in.
The geese subsided into angry gossip. Mother Fatchet’s eldest grandchild was supposed to be herding them but he’d taken time off to swing on a low branch of one of the cemetery pines; now he jumped down, picked up his long stick, put his thumb in his mouth and stood watching her sulkily. Margaret said good morning to him as she rode on, but he didn’t answer. For the first time she realized how suspicious everybody was nowadays — suspicious of strangers, suspicious of neighbors. Anyone could betray you. Perhaps other villages were different — friendly and easy — but this village was like a bitch with a hurt foot: move and it snarled.
Of course, people didn’t have to like each other. Even sweet Aunt Anne had quarreled with jolly Cousin Mary, quarreled twenty years ago about a silver teapot. Now they never visited, never spoke; Cousin Mary sent Aunt Anne a pot of honey in high summer and Aunt Anne sent Cousin Mary a pot of damson cheese in late autumn, and that was all.
But nobody liking or trusting anybody — it couldn’t have been like that before the Changes.
She made poor Scrub scrabble up the loose-stoned path to the very ridge of the Beacon, though it was just as short and much easier to go round the side. Another curious thing struck her: the great earth ramparts of the Beacon had been built thousands of years ago, before the Romans came, but she only knew that — only knew about the Romans coming, too — because she’d been told it before the Changes, when she was less than nine. Nobody told you that sort of thing nowadays: there wasn’t any history. Everyone talked and behaved as though England had always been the same as it was now, and always would be; the only thing to mark one year off from another was a rick catching fire, or a bad harvest, or a big tree falling, or a witch being caught and stoned. No one ever mentioned the Changes, if they could help it.
And that was how she’d thought herself until four days ago, until Jonathan had spattered the petrol over the stocks and she’d remembered that seaside filling station.
She reined Scrub in for a breather at the very top of the Beacon, where the old triangulation point had been (some fanatic had managed to knock the cement into fragments with a sledgehammer), and looked at the enormous landscape with new eyes. Always before it had been the dim hills of Wales which had excited her, and the many-elmed green leagues between the two escarpments, and the glistening twists of the Severn. Now it was the gray smudge in the middle, Gloucester, the dead city.
Always before she had looked away from it, as though it were something horrible, a stone and slate disease. Now she wanted to see what it was like since all the people had left it. You couldn't live in a big city now: there was nothing to live on, no one to buy from or sell to; besides, the whole place must smell of the wickedness of machines.
Brookthorpe is the first village in the Vale, just as Edge is the last village in the hills. Margaret seldom rode down into the Vale, but she found a way by lanes and footpaths, cutting across fields where no path led in the right direction. There was much less arable land since tractors were gone, and cows were mostly herded by children, so many of the hedges had been allowed to go into gaps.
Cousin Mary had moved. A pretty young woman was living in her cottage and the old apple tree had been cut down. The new owner said that Cousin Mary had gone to live with a friend at Hempsted, right down by the river. She told Margaret how to get there.
The Vale has a quite different feel to it from the hills. It’s not just that the fields are flatter and most of the houses are brick: the air smells different, and the people have a different look, sly and knowing; the farms are dirtier too, and the lanes twist for no good reason (up in the hills they twist to take a slope the best way, or so as not to lose height when one is following a contour). Margaret had to ask her way several times, and the answer always came in a strange, soft voice with a sideways look.
She skirted a dead housing development, came to a rotary and rode north along a big road for nearly a mile, looking for a lane to the left. The buildings by the road were rusting old factories and garages, and sometimes a little group of shops with their windows broken and all their goods stolen. Cars and lorries rusted in forecourts, and pale tatters of advertising posters dangled from walls. One place, an open-air used-car mart, had been set on fire, for all the cars were twisted and charred; you’d only have to walk along the lines of them, taking off the filler-caps and poking blazing rags in with a stick — dangerous, but some people were fanatical against machines.
As soon as she’d turned off along the lane to Hemp-sted Margaret had a disappointment. A bridge took her over a river, which she at first thought must be the Severn, only it seemed too mean and narrow. She stopped on the bridge and gazed north and south, and saw that the river ran unnaturally straight, and that there were man-made embankments on both sides and a path running all along its bank. So it wasn’t a mean and narrow river but a man-made thing, a noble great canal, far wider than the silted thin affair that ran through Stroud. This wasn’t dug for narrow barges, but for proper ships; she could see from the color of the water, a flinty gray, that it was deep enough to take seagoing vessels.
Supposing that they could get under the bridge. But no, that wouldn’t be necessary, because the whole bridge was made to swivel sideways, out of the way of passing ships. There was even a crankhandle to turn it with.
She was still wondering whether the bridge would really have swung if she’d had the nerve to turn the handle when she came into Hempsted. Cousin Mary’s new house was a little cottage close in under the churchyard wall. Cousin Mary herself was busy forking dung into the tiny garden, but she stopped her work to receive the precious pot of damson cheese and to ask formally after all her relations up in the hills. She seemed to be not really “living with a friend” as the woman in Brookthorpe had suggested, but to be more of a servant here, like Lucy was on the farm. But she offered to take Margaret into the cottage and show her the place where she’d spilled boiling water on her leg, and it wouldn’t heal because Mrs. Barnes down the road had put a spite on her. Margaret said, “No, thank you.” There was a great tattered bandage round Cousin Mary’s leg, all yellow with new dung and older dirt — no wonder it wouldn’t heal. She said good-bye, rode back to the little lane through Hempsted and turned left. She was going to see what Gloucester looked like.