The Memory of Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

size. It was a portrait, the head and shoulders of a man, and if the hair had not been so long, Curtis would have been looking at a mirror image of himself.
    ‘You don’t recognize it?’
    ‘It looks like me.’
    She frowned. ‘I understood you went there today. It’s the knight from the window in the church at Raven Dip.’
    ‘I’ll take your word for that,’ Curtis said. ‘I didn’t really scrutinize his features. I was paying more attention to the head he was holding in his fist.’
    ‘You could be twins,’ Francesca said. ‘It struck me straight away. I’m amazed my father didn’t comment on it.’
    ‘Maybe he missed it.’
    ‘Don’t be fooled by the stoner vocabulary. He misses nothing. And it’s an uncanny likeness.’
    ‘Uncanny,’ Curtis said, the word sounding as hollow as he suddenly felt.

TWO
    C urtis spent the whole of the following morning busily engaged with his tests. The soil was as nutrient-rich as he’d expected it to be. Most of it, for most of its life in the millennium since the clearance of the original forest, had been wilderness. The land had not been worked to exhaustion under rotated crops.
    It was rich in minerals and moist, a dark, loamy earth that would support the root systems of mature trees ideally. The cliffs, geologically, were a spine separating the sea from the land. A few metres inland from their granite bedrock the stone gave way to clay. And it was clay that lay under the thirty feet or so of soil covering the entirety of the area to be re-forested.
    Even at the cliffs, the soil was six or seven feet deep a stride inland from the edge. Good enough for yew trees. The forest would flourish to their very brink, as it had, apparently, in ancient times, when he imaged one or two huntsmen chasing deer or boar perhaps, experiencing surprise as their last living emotion as they blundered upon the sheer drop down to the shore.
    He’d have to brush up on his climbing skills. Recovery of the raw materials from the threatened places at the coastal areas he’d talked about meant abseiling and he hadn’t abseiled in a few years. His head for heights was cool enough. The rest was just checking and re-checking your gear because most abseiling fatalities were caused by carelessness in failing to notice that pitons weren’t securely hammered home or that ropes had frayed.
    He surveyed the land from the seat of a quad bike, stopping occasionally, still somewhat numbed by the sheer scale of the enterprise envisioned by Saul Abercrombie. He began to calculate in his mind the manpower and machinery that would be required, the plant and the living quarters they would need to build and the logistics of recruiting and briefing and feeding the army of arboreal workers needed to transform a dream into something living and real.
    It was ambitious and exciting. And it was lucrative. The previous evening Abercrombie had told him he wanted everything accomplished over a ten-week time frame. Three months at the outside, he said, joking that the extra fortnight was only available if they had to factor in some major catastrophe. Curtis’ fee for this was £250,000. If he delivered on the nail he qualified for a bonus. It was considerably more money than he had managed to earn over the past five years of his working life.
    His criss-cross route across the site brought him at one point in his progress close to Gibbet Mourning. He stopped and from the saddle of the bike saw that the great thorn bush possessed in daylight almost the same menace it had in darkness. It was squat and baleful and ugly. Its branches were almost implausibly thick and fibrous and there was something anthropomorphic about them in the sunshine. They seemed like strong and sinewy limbs twisted and contorted with the promise of the pain they could inflict.
    He looked at the thorns. He noticed with a shudder that in daylight several of them had the corpses of birds impaled on them. They must have flown into the horny talons of