Mr. Crook called for me, as arranged, promptly at seven the next morning.
"So as we'll catch the dew on the buttercups?" he said, twinkling with elderly gallantry.
He had brought a motorcycle of his own approximate vintage, on which to transport us into the countryside. The plant presses were tidily strapped to the sides of this enormous machine, like bumpers on a tugboat. It was a leisurely ramble through the quiet countryside, made all the more quiet by contrast with the thunderous roar of Mr. Crook's cycle, suddenly throttled into silence.
The old man did indeed know a lot about the local plants, I discovered. Not only where they were to be found but their medicinal uses, and how to prepare them.
I wished I had brought a notebook to get it all down, but listened intently to the cracked old voice, and did my best to commit the information to memory as I stowed our specimens in the heavy plant presses.
We stopped for a packed luncheon near the base of a curious flat-topped hill. Green as most of its neighbors, with the same rocky juts and crags, it had something different: a well-worn path leading up one side and disappearing abruptly behind a granite outcrop.
"What's up there?" I asked, gesturing with a ham sandwich.
"It seems a difficult place for picnicking."
"Ah." Mr. Crook glanced at the hill.
"That's Lyndhia. I'd meant to show you after our meal."
"Really? Is there something special about it?"
"Oh, Yes," he answered, but refused to elaborate further, merely saying that I'd see when I saw.
I had some fears about his ability to climb such a steep path, but these evaporated as I found myself panting in his wake. At last, Mr. Crook extended a gnarled hand and pulled me up over the rim of the hill.
"There it is." He waved a hand with a sort of proprietorial gesture.
"Why, it's a henge!" I said, delighted.
"A miniature henge!"
Because of the war, it had been several years since I had last visited Salisbury Plain, but Douglas and I had seen Stonehenge soon after we were married.
Like the other tourists wandering awed among the huge standing stones, we had gaped at the Altar Stone where ancient Druid priests performed their dreadful uman sacrifices, announced the sonorous Cockney tour guide accompanying a bus-load of Italian tourists, who all dutifully took photographs of the rather ordinary-looking stone block.
Out of the same passion for exactness that made Douglas adjust his ties on the hanger so that the ends hung precisely even, we had even trekked around the circumference of the circle, pacing off the distance between the Z holes and the Y holes, and counting the lintels in the Sarsen Circle, the outermost ring of monstrous uprights.
Three hours later, we knew how many Y and Z holes there were (fifty-nine, if you care; I didn't), but had no more clue to the purpose of the structure than had the dozens of amateur and professional archaeologists who had crawled over the site for the last five hundred years.
No lack of opinions, of course. Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes.
A temple. A burial ground. An astronomical observatory. A place of execution (hence the inaptly named "Slaughter Stone" that lies to one side, half sunk in its own pit).
An open-air market. I liked this last suggestion, visualizing Megalithic housewives strolling between the lintels, baskets on their arms, critically judging the glaze on the latest shipment of red-clay beakers and listening skeptically to the claims of stone-age bakers and vendors of deer-bone shovels and amber beads.
The only thing I could see against that hypothesis was the presence of bodies under the Altar Stone and cremated remains in the Z holes. Unless these were the hapless remains of merchants accused of short-weighting the customers, it seemed a bit unsanitary to be burying people in the marketplace.
There were no signs of burial in the miniature henge on top of the hill. By "miniature," I mean only that the circle of standing stones was smaller than Stonehenge; each stone was still twice my own height, and massive in proportion.
I had heard from another tour-guide at Stonehenge that these stone circles occur all over Britain and Europe—some in better repair than others, some differing slightly in orientation or form, all of purpose and origin unknown.
Mr. Crook stood smiling benignly as I prowled among the stones, pausing now and then to touch one gently, as though my touch could make an impression on the monumental boulders.
Some of the standing stones were brindled, striped with dim colors. Others were speckled with flakes of mica that caught the morning sun with a cheerful shimmer. All of them were remarkably different from the clumps of native stone that thrust out of the bracken all around.
Whoever built the stone circles, and for whatever purpose, thought it important enough to have quarried, shaped, and transported special stone blocks for the erection of their testimonial. Shaped how, Transported how, and from what unimaginable distance?
"My husband would be fascinated," I told Mr. Crook, stopping to thank him for showing me the place and the plants.
"I'll bring him up to see it later." The gnarled old man gallantly offered me an arm at the top of the trail.
I took it, deciding after one look down the precipitous decline that in spite of his age, he was likely steadier on his pins than I was.
I swung down the road that afternoon toward the village, to fetch Douglas from the vicarage. I happily breathed in that heady Upland mix of heather, sage, and broom, spiced here and there with chimney smoke and the tang of fried herring, as I passed the scattered cottages.
The village lay nestled in a small declivity at the foot of one of those soaring crags that rise so steeply from the Upland moors.
Those cottages near the road were nice. The bloom of postwar prosperity had spread as far as a new coat of paint, and even the manse, which must be at least a hundred years old, sported bright yellow trim around its sagging windowframes.
The vicar's housekeeper answered the door, a tall, stringy woman with three strands of artificial pearls round her neck.
Hearing who I was, she welcomed me in and towed me down a long, narrow, dark hallway, lined with sepia engravings of people who may have been famous personages of their time,or cherished relatives of the present vicar, but might as well have been the Royal Family, for all I could see of their features in the gloom.
By contrast, the vicar's study was bunding with light from the enormous windows that ran nearly from ceiling to floor in one wall.
An easel near the fireplace, bearing a half- finished oil of black cliffs against the evening sky, showed the reason for the windows, which must have been added long after the house was built.
Douglas and a short, tubby man with a clerical dog-collar were cozily poring over a mass of tattered paper on the desk by the far wall.
Douglas barely looked up in greeting, but the vicar politely left off his explanations and hurried over to clasp my hand, his round face beaming with sociable delight.
"Mrs. Affleck!" he said, pumping my hand heartily.
"How nice to see you again. And you've come just in time to hear the news!"
"News?" Casting an eye on the grubbiness and typeface of the papers on the desk, I calculated the date of the news in question as being likely around 1750. Not precisely stop-the- presses, then.
"Yes, indeed. We've been tracing your husband's ancestor, Jackie Affleck, through the army dispatches of the period."
The vicar leaned close, speaking out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in an American film.
"I've them borrowed the original dispatches from the local Historical Society files.
You'll be careful not to tell anyone?"
Amused, I agreed that I would not reveal his deadly secret, and looked about for a comfortable chair in which to receive the latest revelations from the eighteenth century.
The wing chair nearest the windows looked suitable, but as I reached to turn it toward the desk, I discovered that it was already occupied. The inhabitant, a small boy with a shock of glossy black hair, was curled up in the depths of the chair, sound asleep.
"Roger!" The vicar, coming to assist me, was as surprised as I am. The boy, startled out of sleep, shot bolt upright, wide eyes the color of moss.
"Now what are you up to in here, you young scamp?" The vicar was scolding affectionately.
"Oh, fell asleep reading the comic papers again?" He scooped up the brightly colored pages and handed them to the lad.
"Run along now, Roger, I have business with the Afflecks. Oh, wait, I've forgotten to introduce you—Mrs. Affleck, this is my son, Roger."