The Stone Wife

‘I couldn’t tell you without checking the records.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Hardly a tree in sight these days. It’s all farming round here, is it?’

‘Used to be. When they built the motorway the village of North Petherton was turned into a commuter settlement.’

The M5 ran in parallel, east of the A38 they were travelling along. ‘Bit of a shake-up for the locals.’

‘And how. It went straight through Petherton Park, where we’re going.’

‘Did they make any interesting finds when they put the road through?’

‘None that I’ve heard about.’

‘You must hate it.’

‘The motorway? Not really. We can’t stand in the way of progress. The canals and the railways opened up the rural areas in their day. This is the modern equivalent. Take the next left and I’ll show you Parker’s Field, where the Chaucer family lived.’

‘Is that a known fact, about Chaucer actually living here?’

‘A known fact? Maybe not. It’s believed in these parts, I can tell you. We’re proud of our connection with him.’

‘You don’t think the forester thing was just a sinecure and he stayed in London?’

‘Absolutely not,’ Carroll said as if he was speaking of his own career. ‘Being forester was a proper job. The forest brought in revenue for the royal purse. It was all enclosed and the locals had to pay to graze their cattle and pigs and there were tolls for using the forest tracks. Acorns and beech mast were particularly prized for pig feed. Managing all this was a big responsibility. You couldn’t possibly do it from London.’

‘And you even know the house?’

‘We know where it was sited. Tradition has it that the Chaucers lived in the Park House, or Parker’s Field House, and there’s usually some truth in tradition. The house was recorded as early as 1336. The family would have moved in later, of course, towards the end of the century.’

The rows of modern housing they were driving past made it impossible to visualise how the view must have appeared to Chaucer. Tim Carroll gave directions from the back and they worked their way through a dull estate towards a more open area. ‘You can stop here.’

‘We’ll need to,’ Leaman said. ‘The road ends.’

‘That’s a mercy,’ Diamond muttered.

‘What was that?’

‘Touch of cramp. I’ll be glad of a stretch.’

‘The developers never give up,’ Carroll said. ‘I don’t give this much of a future as open country.’

They got out and stood at the edge of a recently ploughed field. Diamond eased his stomach more audibly than he intended. ‘Noisy,’ he said at once. ‘If I was deputy forester I wouldn’t buy a house here.’

‘That’s the motorway you can hear.’

‘Thought so.’

‘Do we need to go any further?’ Leaman asked. ‘We’ll be up to our knees in mud.’

‘It’s living history,’ Diamond said. ‘We didn’t come all this way to sit in the car.’

‘I can show you the general area of the house, but there’s nothing to mark the spot,’ Carroll said.

‘We’ll be right behind you,’ Diamond said. What he wanted most was a few more minutes in the open air.

After trudging some distance through the freshly tilled soil, Carroll stopped and looked right and left, trying to get his bearings. ‘To the best of my knowledge, this is where Park House was. There was a dig here a dozen years ago. Reading University.’

‘Led by John Gildersleeve,’ Diamond said. ‘They traced the foundations, but found damn all else.’

‘That isn’t surprising,’ Carroll said. ‘Park House didn’t last beyond the Tudor era. In those days the builders reused materials. It would have been cannibalised. It’s likely most of the fabric was used for Broad Lodge, a house in Petherton Park erected in the seventeenth century.’

‘Still standing?’

Carroll shook his head. ‘And there’s another reason why the Reading dig was unsuccessful. A local archivist has recently discovered a Bridgwater Mercury report of an earlier excavation in 1843. A vicar from Taunton brought a team here and they were digging for about six months.’

Diamond chuckled at that. ‘And Gildersleeve hadn’t heard? That’s rich. I bet the Victorians dug up everything that was worth having.’

‘There’s no record of what they found. My society made an intensive search of all the local press and documents held at the records office and came up with nothing more than that five-line report tucked away in the newspaper.’

The laughter was working like a dose of Rennies. The discomfort eased.

‘How about this for a theory?’ Diamond said with more enthusiasm than he’d shown all day. ‘The Taunton vicar unearthed the Wife of Bath. She’d been sculpted especially to decorate Chaucer’s house and lay buried right here where we’re standing for all those centuries. Along comes the local magpie, William Stradling, and makes the vicar an offer he can’t refuse. It would explain how it got into Stradling’s collection.’

‘I rather like it,’ Carroll said after a moment’s thought. ‘One thing we do know about Stradling is that he was alert to anything of interest turning up. And the date is about right. By that time he’d built his museum at Chilton Priory just a few miles north of here and by 1843 he’d be looking to add to his collection.’