A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The pond lay at the foot of the old embankment like a dropped mirror.

Benji had found it by following a path that ran along the bottom of a long grassy bank — the kind of bank that looks natural until you notice its straightness, the way it runs level across the Sussex landscape without curving for the hill or dipping for the valley. This had been a railway once. The Cuckoo Line, they called it, running from the coast up through the High Weald villages — through Horam, through Heathfield, through the warm sheltered heart of East Sussex — until the trains stopped coming and the track was lifted and the embankment began, slowly and without any instruction, to become something else entirely.

That had been decades ago. Now the old stonework was buried under bramble and long grass and the particular warmth that south-facing banks collect when the coastal wind stays away, as it did this morning, and the High Weald settled into the kind of still September day that explains why so many creatures choose to live here rather than anywhere else.

Benji came down from the embankment path to the meadow below, and found the pond.

It was a farm pond — the kind that the High Weald makes naturally, drainage gathering in the low ground between the fields, the water still and dark and very much inhabited. Flag iris crowded the shallow margin. A fringe of reeds moved gently in no wind at all. In the clearer water near the bank, Benji could see the shapes of frogs — motionless, patient, the same colour as the pond bottom — and deeper, the ghost-glide of a smooth newt making its unhurried way through the weed.

He sat on a tussock at the water's edge and looked.

The pond was still. The embankment rose behind him, warm and grassy, the old ballast stones still holding heat from yesterday's sun. Dragonflies — copper and electric-blue — stitched arcs above the lily pads. A moorhen walked the far bank with the self-important air of a very small creature going somewhere important.

And then he noticed the long, smooth ripple crossing the pond from east to west with no wind to explain it.

Something was in the water.

He leaned forward very still.

A head emerged from the reeds on the far bank — narrow, elegant, with large round eyes that caught the morning light. Behind it, moving in long beautiful S-curves, was a body perhaps two feet long, olive-brown and smooth, with a pale cream collar just behind the head where the scales had a particular cleanness about them.

A grass snake.

She crossed the open water without hurrying, without any visible effort, as if the pond had simply decided to carry her. The lily pads barely stirred as she passed. No splash. No ripple beyond that first long smooth signal. Just that sinuous crossing, completely unhurried, and then she was at the bank below Benji — half in and half out of the water — and she was looking at him.

His red collar was bright in the Horam morning.

Benji looked back.

The woman who had come along the Cuckoo Trail ten minutes earlier, walking a spaniel and carrying a coffee, had seen the ripple in the pond and made a sound Benji hoped never to hear again. The moorhen had clattered off the far bank at first sight of those olive-brown S-curves. Even the frogs in the shallows had gone very still.

But Benji simply looked.