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and only if, you have a moment I would be glad if you could bear to call at the Guggenheim just to say—”
     
    -2-
    Troy enjoyed coming into the locks. Ramsdyke, as she observed in her letter, was a charming one: a seemly house, a modest plot, the towpath, a bridge over The River and the Ramsdyke itself, a neat wet line, Roman-ruled across the fens. On the farther side was the ‘Constable’ view and farther down-stream a weir. The
Zodiac
moved quietly into the lock but before she sank with its waters Troy jumped ashore, posted her letter and followed the direction indicated by the Skipper’s tattooed arm and pointed finger. He called after her ‘Twenty minutes’ and she waved her understanding, crossed the towpath, and climbed a grassy embankment.
    She came into a field bordered by sod and stone walls and, on the left, beyond the wall, by what seemed to be a narrow road leading down to the bridge. This was the Dyke Way of the brochures. Troy remembered that it came from the village of Wapentake, which her map showed as lying about a mile and a half from the lock. She walked up the field. It rose gently and showed, above its crest, trees and a distant spire.
    The air smelt of earth and grass and, delicately, of wood-smoke. It seemed lovely to Troy. She felt a great uplift of spirit and was so preoccupied with her own happiness that she came upon the meeting place of the wapentake, just where the Skipper had said it would be, before she was aware of it.
    It was a circular hollow, sometimes called, the brochure said, a Pot, and it was lined with grass, mosses and fern. Here the Plantagenet knights-of-the-shire had sat at their fortnightly Hundreds, dealing out justice as they saw it in those days and as the growing laws directed them. Troy wondered if, when the list was a heavy one, they stayed on into the evening and night and if torches were lit.
    Below the wapentake hollow and quite close to the lock, another, but a comparatively recent depression had been cut into the hillside: perhaps to get a load of gravel of which there seemed to be a quantity in the soil, or perhaps by archaeological amateurs. An overhanging shelf above this excavation had been roughly shored up by poles with an old door for roof. The wood had weathered and looked to be rotting. “A bit of an eyesore,” thought Troy.
    She went into the wapentake and sat there, and fancied she felt beneath her some indication of a kind of bench that must have been chopped out of the soil, she supposed, seven centuries ago. “I’m an ignoramus about history,” Troy thought, “but I do like to feel it in my bones,” and she peopled the wapentake with heads like carven effigies, with robes in the colours of stained glass and with glints of polished steel.
    She began to wonder if it would be possible to make a very formalised drawing—dark and thronged with seated, lawgiving shapes. A puff of warm air moved the grass and the hair of her head and up the sloping field came Dr Natouche.
    He was bareheaded and had changed his tweed jacket for a yellow sweater. When he saw Troy he checked and stood still, formidable because of his height and colour against the mild background of the waterways. Troy waved to him. “Come up,” she called. “Here’s the wapentake.”
    “Thank you.”
    He came up quickly, entered the hollow and looked about him. “I have read the excellent account in our little book,” he said. “So here they sat, those old chaps.” The colloquialism came oddly from him.
    “You sit here, too,” Troy suggested, wanting to see his head and his torso, in its yellow sweater, against the moss and fern.
    He did so, squaring himself and resting his hands on his knees. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were high accents in the picture he presented for Troy. “You ask for the illustration of an incongruity,” he said.
    “You would be nice to paint. Do you really feel incongruous? I mean is this sort of thing quite foreign to you?”
    “Not