Wessex Tales: "Crossing" (Story 31)

This is one of the 38 stories in my collection...

  ~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘ Crossing ’

  (Story 31 of 38)

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright Robert Fripp 2013

  Wessex Tales: the story ‘Crossing’

  ISBN: 978-0-9918575-7-9

  To help you find my e-stories,

  use the search term ‘Wessex Tales:Fripp’

  Thank you for supporting me.

  Find books by Robert Fripp (Robert S. P. Fripp),

  with reviews, at https://RobertFripp.ca/

  or through online booksellers.

  Cover

  A lady in her salad days on a postcard

  with a U.K. postmark, ‘Birmingham 1912’.

  Posted again a century later, you can find her at:

  lilyelsie.tumblr.com/post/31945348219

  Cover design by The Design Unit,

  www.thedesignunit.com

  Table of Contents

  ‘Crossing’

  Chapter 2

  Endnote

  The Author’s Note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  WESSEX TALES

  ‘Crossing’

  Circa 1970

  Ninety-six years earlier she had been born in the great brick manor house set in fields between Child Okeford and Manston, in Dorset. Queen Victoria was in her prime when this old lady drew first breath. Now she lay dying, in a house close to the church at Okeford, a long church-bell’s call on the stillest of nights from the elegant place of her birth at Fontmell Parva.

  Shapes came and sat, or stood, beside her bed, moving, merging, murmuring condolences, and leaving, quietly. Dr. Wilson came, did what was expected, promised to return. And all the while the voices near her bed:

  “Do you think she can hear me?”

  “She’s sleeping, dear. Been like that for hours.”

  “Willie Wilson came an hour ago.”

  “Well, he couldn’t say anything, could he?”

  “They can’t, you know.”

  “ ‘She’s resting comfortably,’ he said.”

  Her husband had died first, leaving her alone for too many years. Theirs had been a marriage made in heaven, a marriage full of grace. Happy, hard working, tranquil in retirement, and, at the last, fulfilled.

  For half a century this ancient lady in the darkened bed had claimed to have been the first white woman to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Or maybe she had been the first to walk around its base. Whichever it was, that truth would die with her, leaving a local legend to endure. Certainly Mount Kilimanjaro was engraved on her heart.

  And on her late husband’s heart, too. Perhaps his passion for Africa had started at school. He had been a capable scholar. On at least one occasion he had been awarded a prize for scholarship, a thick, impressive, leather-bound tome with his school’s crest embossed on the morocco of the outer cover, the book’s title in rich gold-leaf on the spine. It had been presented to him one Prize Day, in a packed hall thronged with well-scrubbed young men and their parents: the fathers, gentlemen all; the mothers, ladies in flowing silk gowns with their bustled behinds, their small floral hats fastened under the chin.

  Imagine for a moment that the year is 1872. A young man is called to the dais and, with solemnity befitting the occasion, his headmaster presents him with a most ‘improving’ book.

  “To mark your outstanding scholastic achievement, T---, the School is pleased to present you with this copy of The Zambesi and its Tributaries, by Messrs. David and Charles Livingstone, whose names, I know, need no introduction to this audience.

  “Congratulations, T---. I hope that this will serve as an inspiration to you, as your achievements with us will serve as an inspiration to the younger members of the School. You carry forward from today our very best wishes for your future.”

  A handshake follows, then applause and a retreat from the stage in a flush of pink-cheeked pride, with a furtive glance at the fresh inscription on the label pasted inside the front cover while the business of Speech Day goes on. Beneath the engraved name of the school and its coat of arms is penned: “To Mr. H. R. T---, as a prize for passing the Cambridge local examination in honors. 1871. Easter term, 1872. [Signed] Godfrey Goodman, D.D. Head Master.” [ref_1]

  T--- seemed pre-destined for Africa. He proposed himself for service with Kenya’s Colonial Administration at the height of Empire; he married a spirited young wife who was prepared to share his hardships; and eventually he became a District Commissioner in Kenya.

  Decades later, back in England, the couple bought the house near the church at Okeford and filled it with trophies and memorabilia from two lifetimes of service to Britain and Empire. Their drawing room was a treasure-trove of Africa: trophy heads snarled down from every wall; on one, crossed assegais, mounted behind a shield of zebra-hide. Canes and shooting-sticks from younger days stood in a German shell casing expended against British colonial troops in East Africa during the Great War by General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe. Above the fireplace a giant tusk took pride of place, resting on ebony supports. There was other ivory, less impressive, carved into statues, fetishes, and blades. And against the inner wall, safe from damp, a bookcase full of worthy books, none very new, the top shelf braced by elephantine book-ends nicknamed Claude and Cecil, whose bodies were carved from a hard, black, exotic wood, their tusks and eyes of ivory, challenging any who would dare to take a book. In this row stood the Livingstones’ Zambesi book, more than a lifetime old, the penned inscription fading with the Empire, the inscriber having died a distant world and two world wars ago.

  While the couple still lived they presented me with one of the assegais and the zebra-hide shield. But that was then. Everything present would soon be gone from this living museum when the lady upstairs breathed her last. Contents would go piece by piece, lot after lot, till the room was reduced to an echo of feet on bare floor, with faded Edwardian wallpaper of musk-rose design betraying the outlines where pictures had hung, the shield-shapes of trophies, and one strange ellipse where the real shield, the Zulu shield, had been. For now a great clock still presided, measuring life and time implacably, with neither favor nor remorse.

  Upstairs, the lady dreamed, not of her days as a young wife in the Kenya Colony, not even of Kilimanjaro or the great Zambezi and its tributaries. She dreamed of times long, long before, when, as a carefree girl, she had explored these reaches of the little Stour valley and the hills that overlooked the Blackmore Vale. Her own life’s mentor had been an explorer too, not of distant spaces, like Livingstone, but of distant, archaeological time. As a girl she had been bewitched by these curious man-hewn hills looming above the valley and the vale.

  As a little girl she had had the privilege of a visit to an excavation on Salisbury Plain with that giant of nineteenth century archaeology, General Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers. A dogcart ride later, sitting demurely between her parents, she had worshipped this great god of a man while he took tea with them in an arbor at his Larmer Tree estate.

  Much later, married, far from home and homesick, she had sent for volumes of the General’s massive work, Excavations on Cranborne Chase. (Years before he became the archaeologist who defined scientific method in this field, Pitt-Rivers had managed the British Army’s transition from muskets to rifles.)

  Time was the leveler that made Dorset’s ancient past as remote from Victorian Dorset as from Victorian Kenya. So, for much of this lady’s life, the pre-history of Wessex had been her great comfort, her so
lace, her ticket to home.

  “I think she’s waking up. Look at her eyelids.”

  “Just a dream, dear, I should think.”

  “She’s still breathing all right. I can see the blankets move.”

  Thus the watchers watched, and waited.