None of them noticed the Colonel who had been standing at the entrance to one of the several alleys leading to the churchyard from the opposite side of Bankers Road. He had been there since Lily had stormed round the corner and watched as Charles had hurtled after her. He was about to see if they were alright when that young fool, Smythe and his flirtatious wife had showed up and for some reason he decided to stay where he was, unseen, until they had moved off.
He stared after them with a far off look in his eyes, thinking hard about what to do with regards the challenge that had been set down by Charles Caldercott the previous day. In his time, things would have been a good deal more straightforward. A formal challenge would have been issued and accepted and then the matter would have been settled, somewhere away from prying eyes. Although very illegal and now, he realised, very rash, it had been an honourable way to sort out differences and he was not sure that a return to the methods of old would be a bad thing for some of today’s youth.
But of course, things change and times change. He couldn’t rely on the strategies of the past any more and new, more cunning tactics would have to be used here, especially in this situation where there were complications.
He had thought about these complications a lot recently. He knew that his time was drawing to a close, the old oak tree in front of The Manor House seemed to be groaning much more now, its ancient limbs rocking in the winds that swept up from the Solent, along the river valley and into the village, where they were briefly lifted above the chimney pots before buffeting the hillside upon which the oak and the house had stood for so long. He believed he could read the old tree as well as if it were speaking to him, every creak and every whisper meant something, telling tales of the events it had witnessed during its thousand year life. It spoke of the Viking raider who had planted it there in the early 1000’s, of the battles fought and won, of the Bishops and Kings who had visited this place over the centuries, of the houses built here, home to generation after generation of the Colonel’s own family, a heritage survived by him alone, a line of succession that only he, in all that time, had failed to continue.
That indeed was the crux of the matter. The root of the discontent that he admitted, at least to himself, he had sowed throughout the village in recent years. The end of a line that could be traced back so far in time but would go no further than him, his barren life, childless, loveless and therefore, he had begun to suspect, meaningless. His family and its descendents had been here for a thousand years. They had had their ups and downs, swinging from being loved benefactors to despised tyrants and all points between, but they had always been here. The plot where The Manor House now stood had seen the coming and goings of many structures, from the original small wooden dwelling built by Daninfald to the seventeenth and eighteenth century mansion that stood now.
Daninfald was the Viking raider who had first helped sack the monastery and burn the Bishop’s residence to the ground and then ingratiated himself on the small, local population by saving the lives of many of them. Legend had it that single handed he fought off a hundred of his kinsmen who were bent on murder and then was asked to stay by the Bishop of Winchester to protect his interests in the area. The truth would more likely to have been that he had deserted his fellow warriors and hidden up in the woods until they had gone and then scratched out a living until the locals had accepted or at least tolerated his presence. Perhaps he had done some good deeds to ingratiate himself, hence the extrapolated legend that had him saving lives. Whatever the real facts of his arrival, there seemed to be no disputing the fact that he had in fact arrived at the time, settled amongst the trees on the hill and eventually sired a family that became the root of a thousand years of history.
The other proven fact was the existence of an oak tree in the meadow on the lower slopes of the hill since around the turn of the first millennium. Two years ago, some botanical historians had arrived and performed some dating tests on the tree, conclusively proving its antiquity. The Colonel had known since he was a child that his distant ancestor had planted a tree in the meadow the year he had settled there and the tests merely confirmed this fact for him. This knowledge was just a part of the family history passed from generation to generation over the past 1000 years. The village had been excited though by the fact that one of the oldest trees in the land sat in their midst and a committee, chaired by the Colonel of course, had been established to look after its welfare. There was to be a Thousand Year Celebratory Fete and concert in the meadow later this year as the year 1001, the arrival of the Danes in the south of England, was deemed to be as good as any for the birth date of the tree. The Colonel anticipated it would also be a celebration of his family’s ‘reign’ in Waltham Wood, although there were voices of dissent amongst the committee members on that particular issue.
Despite his melancholy about the fast approaching demise of the Danesbury name here in Waltham Wood, there was one potential way to continue the family line. He had long discounted it as anything more than a last resort, but he was beginning to believe that a last resort was the only one left to him.
As he stood there in the street, watching the small group wander down towards the pub he could taste a bitterness in his mouth at the thought of what he would have to do and the secrets he was going to have to divulge.
The Oak. – out in December 2014
Copyright Paul Bondsfield 2013.
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