Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [23]
To Hamish this was “soft country”—peaceful and prosperous, where a living came more easily than in the harsh, often barren landscapes of the Highlands. That very harshness, in Hamish’s opinion, had made the Scots formidable fighting men.
Norfolk had produced fine soldiers, too, Rutledge reminded him. But as far as Hamish was concerned, training and blood were two very different factors in the making of an army. One could be taught—the other was in the very bone.
Even in the trenches Hamish had been fond of citing examples—some of them ranging back to the twelfth century—of Scottish prowess in battle. It was, Rutledge thought, a way of life that had seldom brought prosperity or contentment to the Highlands, but in pride and fierce spirit, it had bred a full measure of courage.
The miles rolled away behind them, and then the road Rutledge was driving wound through a cut in a hill and unexpectedly came to an end facing a broad expanse of marshes, as flat as they were striking and bronzed now with the coming winter’s palette of red-brown and yellow and old gold. He paused at the junction to stare out across them, thinking to himself that for such a small country, England had its share of beauty.
Here the road went either right toward Cley or left toward Hunstanton, running along the landward edges of the marsh as far as the eye could see. Rutledge turned left, feeling the wind coming in from the northwest, bearing with it the cries of gulls out along the ridge of dunes by the sea. Rounding a curve a few miles farther on, Rutledge found himself in the outskirts of a small, sprawling village, lying under a sky that looked like a great gray bowl, holding in the light from the unseen water beyond the marshes to his right.
This wasn’t the famous “Constable sky,” those broad horizons that the artist had made his signature: vast banks of clouds filled with delicate color that somehow emphasized the simplicity of the ordinary lives he chose to paint. Farm lads fishing or tired horses drawing a haywain across a tree-shaded stream, each caught in his workaday world—rustic beauty unaware of the grandeur overhead.
Here the sky was self-effacing canopy, accepting its more prosaic role of joining sea and land even when the sea was nowhere to be seen. But it was out there, beyond the marshes that had taken root on the salty, wet silt it had left behind. This part of Norfolk had fought long battles with the forces of wind and water, which had often changed the shape of the coastline. A village might lie on the shore this century and find itself miles away from the sea in the next.
The first scattering of houses led him next into the village of Osterley. To his left a great flint church stood high on a grassy knoll, well above the main road and looking down across it to the houses that marked the waterfront. A church, Rutledge thought, that must have been built by the wool trade and heavy coastal shipping. There were a goodly number of these cathedrals in miniature in Norfolk, which had seen a flourishing economy in its day. If he remembered his history correctly, Osterley had been one of the great ports in the Middle Ages, and some of those riches had gone into the clerestory and the strong soaring towers, creating a sense of light and power at the same time.
Rutledge turned up the lane leading to the church, driving up the hill for a better look. A sign posted by the churchyard gate told him that this was Holy Trinity.
Someone—a woman—walked out the church door, a notebook in her hand, and shielding her eyes, looked up at the clerestory. The way the wind played with her skirts and the long coat she wore, Rutledge got the impression that she