The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (7 page)

There was no one about in Ford's yard when Butcher rode in. He parked his bike,
filled up his tractor with paraffin and petrol, warmed the engine, hitched the
plough behind, mounted the high seat and drove out to
Thistley
Green.

The field was not half a mile away, and around eight-thirty Butcher drove the
tractor in through the gate on to the field itself.
Thistley
Green was maybe a hundred acres all told, with a low hedge running round it.
And although it was actually one large field, different parts of it were owned
by different men. These separate parts were easy to define because each was
cultivated in its own way.
Rolfe's
plot of four and a
half acres was over to one side near the southern boundary fence. Butcher knew
where it was and he drove his tractor round the edge of the field, then inward
until he was on the plot.

The plot was barley stubble now, covered with the short and rotting yellow
stalks of barley harvested last autumn, and only recently it had been
broad-sheared so that now it was ready for the plough.

"Deep-plough it," Ford had said to Butcher the day before. "It's
for sugar-beet.
Rolfe's
putting sugar-beet in
there."

They only plough about four inches down for barley, but for sugar-beet they
plough deep, to ten or twelve inches. A horse-drawn plough can't plough as deep
as that. It was only since motor-tractors came along that the farmers had been
able to deep-plough properly.
Rolfe's
land had been
deep-ploughed for sugar-beet some years before this, but it wasn't Butcher who
had done the
ploughing
and no doubt the job had been
skimped a bit and the ploughman had not gone quite as deep as he should. Had he
done so, what was about to happen today would have happened then, and that
would have been a different story.

Gordon Butcher began to plough. Up and down the field he went, lowering the
plough deeper and deeper each trip until at last it was cutting twelve inches
into the ground and turning up a smooth even wave of black earth as it went.

The wind was coming faster now, rushing in from the killer sea, sweeping over
the flat Norfolk fields, past
Saxthorpe
and
Reepham
and
Honingham
and
Swaffham
and
Larling
and over the
border to Suffolk, to
Mildenhall
and to
Thistley
Green where Gordon Butcher sat upright high on the
seat of his tractor, driving back and forth over the plot of yellow barley
stubble that belonged to
Rolfe
. Gordon Butcher could
smell the sharp crisp smell of snow not far away, he could see the low roof of
the sky -- no longer flecked with black, but pale and whitish grey -- sliding
by overhead like a solid sheet of metal unrolling.

"Well," he said, raising his voice above the clatter of the tractor,
"you are surely
fashed
at somebody today. What
an almighty fuss it is now of
blowin
' and
whistlin
' and
freezin
'. Like a
woman," he added. "Just like a woman does sometimes in the
evening," and he kept his eye upon the line of the furrow, and he smiled.

At noon he stopped the tractor, dismounted and fished in his pocket for his
lunch. He found it and sat on the ground in the lee of one of the huge
tractor-wheels. He ate large pieces of bread and very small pieces of cheese.
He had nothing to drink, for his only Thermos had got smashed by the jolting of
the tractor two weeks before, and in wartime, for this was in January 1942, you
could not buy another anywhere. For about fifteen minutes he sat on the ground
in the shelter of the wheel and ate his lunch. Then he got up and examined his
peg.

Unlike many ploughmen, Butcher always hitched his plough to the tractor with a
wooden peg so that if the plough fouled a root or a large stone, the peg would
simply break at once, leaving the plough behind and saving the shares from
serious damage. All over the black fen country, just below the surface, lie
enormous trunks of ancient oak trees, and a wooden peg will save a ploughshare
many times a week out there. Although
Thistley
Green
was well-cultivated land, field-land, not fen-land, Butcher was taking no
chances with his plough.

He examined the wooden peg, found it sound, mounted the tractor again, and went
on with his
ploughing
.

The tractor nosed back and forth over the ground, leaving a smooth black wave
of soil behind it. And still the wind blew colder but it did not snow.

Around three o'clock the thing happened.

There was a slight jolt, the wooden peg broke, and the tractor left the plough
behind. Butcher stopped, dismounted and walked back to the plough to see what
it had struck. It was surprising for this to have happened here, on field-land.
There should be no oak trees underneath the soil in this place.

He knelt down beside the plough and began to scoop the soil away around the
point of the ploughshare. The lower tip of the share was twelve inches down.
There was a lot of soil to be scooped up. He dug his gloved fingers into the
earth and scooped it out with both hands. Six inches
down.
. . eight inches. . . ten inches. . . twelve. He slid his fingers along the
blade of the ploughshare until they reached the forward point of it. The soil
was loose and crumbly, and it kept falling back into the hole he was digging.
He could not therefore see the twelve-inch-deep point of the share. He could
only feel it. And now he could feel that the point was indeed lodged against
something solid. He scooped away more earth. He enlarged the hole. It was necessary
to see clearly what sort of an obstacle he had struck. If it was fairly small,
then perhaps he could dig it out with his hands and get on with the job. If it
was a tree-trunk he would have to go back to Ford's and fetch a spade.

"Come on," he said aloud. "I'll have you out of there, you
hidden demon, you rotten old thing." And suddenly, as the gloved fingers
scraped away a final handful of black earth, he caught sight of the curved rim
of something flat, like the rim of a huge thick plate sticking up out of the
soil. He rubbed the rim with his fingers and he rubbed again. Then all at once,
the rim gave off a greenish glint, and Gordon Butcher bent his head closer and
closer still, peering down into the little hole he had dug with his hands. For
one last time, he rubbed the rim clean with his fingers, and in a flash of
light, he saw clearly the unmistakable blue-green crust of ancient buried
metal, and his heart stood still.

It should be explained here that farmers in this part of Suffolk, and
particularly in the
Mildenhall
area, have for years
been turning up ancient objects from the soil. Flint arrowheads from very long
ago have been found in considerable numbers, but more interesting than that,
Roman pottery and Roman implements have also been found. It is known that the
Romans
favoured
this part of the country during their
occupation of Britain, and all local farmers are therefore well aware of the
possibility of finding something interesting during a day's work. And so there
was a kind of permanent awareness among
Mildenhall
people of the presence of treasure underneath the earth of their land.

Gordon Butcher's reaction, as soon as he saw the rim of that enormous plate,
was a curious one. He immediately drew away. Then he got to his feet and turned
his back on what he had just seen. He paused only long enough to switch off the
engine of his tractor before he walked off fast in the direction of the road.

He did not know precisely what impulse caused him to stop digging and walk
away. He will tell you that the only thing he can remember about those first
few seconds was the whiff of danger that came to him from that little patch of
greenish blue. The moment he touched it with his fingers, something electric
went through his body, and there came to him a powerful premonition that this
was a thing that could destroy the peace and happiness of many people.

In the beginning, all he had wished was to be away from it, and to leave it
behind him and be done with it for ever. But after he had gone a few hundred
yards or so, he began to slow his pace. At the gate leading out from
Thistley
Green, he stopped.

"What in the world is the matter with you,
Mr
Gordon Butcher?" he said aloud to the howling wind. "Are you
frightened or something? No, I'm not frightened. But I'll tell you straight.
I'm not keen to handle this alone."

That was when he thought of Ford.

He thought of Ford at first because it was for him that he was working. He
thought of him second because he knew that Ford was a kind of collector of old
stuff, of all the old stones and arrowheads which people kept digging up from
time to time in the district, which they brought to Ford and which Ford placed
upon the mantel in his
parlour
. It was believed that
Ford sold these things, but no one knew or cared how he did it.

Gordon Butcher turned towards Ford's place and walked fast out of the gate on
to the narrow road, down the road around the sharp left-hand corner and so to
the house. He found Ford in his large shed, bending over a damaged harrow,
mending it. Butcher stood by the door and said, "
Mr
Ford!"

Ford looked around without straightening his body.

"Well, Gordon," he said, "
what
is
it?"

Ford was middle-aged or a little older, bald-headed, long-nosed, with a clever
foxy look about his face. His mouth was thin and sour, and when he looked at
you, and when you saw the tightness of his mouth and the thin, sour line of his
lips, you knew that this was a mouth that never smiled. His chin receded, his
nose was long and sharp and he had the air about him of a sour old crafty fox
from the woods.

"What is it?" he said looking up from the harrow.

Gordon Butcher stood by the door, blue-cheeked with cold, a little out of
breath, rubbing his hands slowly one against the other.

"The tractor left the plough behind," he said quietly. "There's
metal down there. I saw it."

Ford's head gave a jerk. "What kind of metal?" he said sharply.

"Flat. Quite flat like a sort of huge plate."

"You didn't dig it out?" Ford had straightened up now and there was a
glint of eagles in his eyes.

Butcher said. "No, I left it alone and came straight on here."

Ford walked quickly over to the corner and took his coat off the nail. He found
a cap and gloves,
then
he found a spade and went
towards the door. There was something odd, he noticed, in Butcher's manner.

"You're sure it was metal?"

"Crusted up," Butcher said. "But it was metal all right."

"How deep?"

"Twelve inches down. At least the top of it was twelve inches down. The
rest is deeper."

"How
d'you
know it was a plate?"

"I don't." Butcher said. "I only saw a little bit of the rim.
But it looked like a plate to me.
An enormous plate."

Ford's foxy face went quite white with excitement. "Come on," he
said. "We'll go back and see."

The two men walked out of the shed into the fierce, ever-mounting fury of the
wind. Ford shivered.

"Curse this filthy weather," he said. "Curse and blast this
filthy freezing weather," and he sank his pointed foxy face deep into the
collar of his coat and began to ponder upon the possibilities of Butcher's
find.

One thing Ford knew which Butcher did not know. He knew that back in 1932 a man
called
Lethbridge
, a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon
Antiquities at Cambridge University, had been excavating in the district and
that he had actually unearthed the foundations of a Roman villa on
Thistley
Green itself. Ford was not forgetting that, and he
quickened his pace. Butcher walked beside him without speaking and soon they
were there. They went through the gate and over the field to the plough which
lay about ten yards behind the tractor.

Ford knelt down beside the front of the plough and peered into the small hole
Gordon Butcher had dug with his hands. He touched the rim of green-blue metal
with a gloved finger. He scraped away a bit more earth. He leaned further
forward so that his pointed nose was right down the hole. He ran fingers over
the rough green surface. Then he stood up and said, "Let's get the plough
out of the way and do some digging." Although there were fireworks
exploding in his head and shivers running all over his body, Ford kept his
voice very soft and casual.

Between them they pulled the plough back a couple of yards.

"Give me the spade," Ford said, and he began cautiously to dig the
soil away in a circle about three feet in diameter around the exposed patch of
metal. When the hole was two feet deep, he threw away the spade and used his
hands. He knelt down and scraped the soil away, and gradually the little patch
of metal grew and grew until at last there lay exposed before them the great
round disc of an enormous plate. It was fully twenty-four inches in diameter.
The lower point of the plough had just caught the raised centre rim of the
plate, for one could see the dent.