A Hint of Witchcraft (12 page)

He remained seated when the others rose to go, almost unaware that the meeting was over, until Bedlow, having gathered up the cutting, moved in his direction.

‘And another thing.' His heavy jowl quivering, he waved the papers close to Humbert's face. One was a picture of one of the young men who had been commended for their public spirit in having recovered the body of the unfortunate girl. ‘It's given you a boost, I dare say, to see your lad's picture in the papers, and him too. He's not the sort to back off from a bit of publicity, they tell me. What about the other lad? He was there as well but very likely he didn't put hisself forward to have his photo taken. I'd like to know how your lad knew where to look for the girl. How did he know, eh? I wouldn't have known. There's not many that would. But he did, your lad, didn't he?'

Who could tell what the old man had in mind beyond an impulse to stir up further trouble for his enemy? In a startled pause several heads turned. Humbert, stupefied by fury, was dumbfounded. From the top of the table Quinian intervened.

‘Mr Bedlow, sir, you should withdraw those remarks. You are out of order. Completely out of order.'

‘The meeting's over, isn't it? I can say what I like.'

‘Yes.' Humbert drew breath and steadied his voice, ‘And that's the sort of thing you like to say, you narrow-minded, blundering skinflint.' He got up. ‘Get out of my way before I lose my temper.' He looked along at Quinian. ‘Mr Chairman, as a favour, would you mind reconvening the meeting? It will take no more than a minute, in fact, the gentlemen don't even need to sit down. I intend to resign as agent of the Fellside and District Coal Company. My resignation will be put in writing immediately.'

His anger had gone. The visiting beams of light had widened and become constant. He felt and look revitalized. The sense of renewal was not unfamiliar: the same lightness of relief had come when he turned his back on the timber business and again when he left the ministry.

‘For God's sake, man, don't put anything in writing until you've thought things over.' Quinian spoke urgently. He and Andrews had stayed when the others left. ‘This isn't a resigning matter.'

‘Strictly speaking we're only responsible for our own working pits,' Andrews reminded him, ‘and the company never worked Lucknow. If anybody is to blame, it's Rilston. A landowner can be prosecuted for any hazard on land accessible to the public and the shaft happens to be on his land.'

‘But only the shaft.' The Rilstons may have had a small royalty on that account before the lease expired but Humbert was quick to see the injustice of holding them responsible when those who had made real money out of Lucknow went scot-free. ‘Even in its present state the shaft is not a hazard. No one could fall into it by accident.' In the heat of the moment the full significance of that fact escaped him.

True enough. Quinian was relieved. ‘The whole thing will blow over. That is, if you don't stir things up by resigning. Your resignation will be seen as an acceptance of responsibility. The company won't like that one bit. Heaven knows what it might let them in for in the way of claims for compensation. There's been mining hereabouts since Roman times.'

‘Dubious liability,' Andrews said. ‘That's typical of mining. It could take years to sort out if anyone were unwise enough to try. The company will wriggle out of it, but what about you, old chap?'

Their anxiety on his behalf touched him, but he did not share it, caught up as he already was in plans for a new project. Here was a chance to put into operation a scheme he had dallied with from time to time, never expecting it to be realized, a scheme which could be advantageous to Rilston too. A quixotic impulse to give Rilston a helping hand confirmed – and excused? – his decision to resign. ‘There's Langland Hall standing empty,' Rilston had said. That was years ago. The place was going to rack and ruin. It would be a public service to take it over, renovate, make the cottages habitable, find work for the unemployed. A land scheme similar to the Surrey smallholdings? Vegetables, poultry, goats, a pottery.… The possibilities were endless. He would take it on a ten-year lease, at a nominal rent, with a clause that if ever the land was to be sold, he would have the first option to buy.

He sat on when the others had gone, absently smoothing the pages of his report into a perfect rectangle, conscious only of having found his true vocation, forgetting that he had seemed to find it twice before. It was some time before he became aware of the surrounding silence and looked at his watch. Only then did it occur to him to wonder how Sarah would feel about leaving Monk's Dene.

CHAPTER X

The rooms at Langland Hall were long and low, the windows narrow. In winter, daylight came late. Indoors it was always twilight except for the fires that roared and blazed in the cavernous grates and were for ever in need of replenishing.

Margot emptied a scuttleful of coal on the sitting-room fire and lingered – guiltily: there was still so much to be done elsewhere. She went to the window. They had been glad that the main rooms faced this way with open views to the south and west, but throughout a particularly sunless November there had been nothing to see but low skies and bare trees. She had learned not to mind the feeling of being shut in; she would even have welcomed the grey gloom that shut out all the things she was missing – if there had been time to notice it or to feel anything beyond the backbreaking tiredness of being constantly on her feet and, occasionally, disbelief that a few months could so transform her life.

All the same it had become a habit to look down towards the road at the end of the long drive connecting the Hall with the outer world, and presently she saw the postman trudging up to the last of the three gates. There might be a letter from Alex.

As soon as the fire was red again she must bring her mother downstairs. The attack of pneumonia had been severe, and so had Dr Pelman. ‘Madness' he called it, to move into this old ruin before the restoration was complete. It had barely begun. The roof was sound and the plumbing worked. Doors and windows had been made weather-proof, but after more than two decades of standing empty, the house still suffered the desolation of neglect.

The Hall had ceased to be a gentleman's residence eighty years ago and had been let to a succession of tenant farmers. Its situation at the end of the so-called drive, now degenerated into a gated cart-road, isolated it from the nearest village of Fellside. Ashlaw, five miles away by road was for all practical purposes out of reach.

Islands of comfort had been fought for and won against fearful odds, but floors were still bare in most of the rooms; cupboards were damp; snail tracks glistened on the flags of the vast kitchen. It would be months before carpenters, decorators and carpet-layers could make the place ship-shape.

Edward used the word casually. Home comforts came low on his formidable list of priorities. First viewed in summer sunshine, the house had seemed to possess the romantic charm of age. Since the removal he had rarely been at home except during the most alarming phase of Sarah's illness. The project he had undertaken involved him in problems he had not foreseen: legal, practical, technical. He had to see architects, surveyors, council officials, merchant builders.…

He glories in it, Sarah thought, hoping the glory would last when so many other things had come to an end. She understood his need to do everything at lightning speed in order to prove that it could be done at all, knowing that Dr Pelman was not the only one to call it madness.

‘A mammoth undertaking,' Edward told her, his eyes glowing, and it was as some cumbersome elephantine creature that Sarah regarded the grey pile into which she had been summarily dumped; a building scarcely less forbidding than the ruined priory 200 yards further up the slope. Had she been as she used to be, she would have thrown herself into the battle for his sake and for Margot's. But from the moment the blow fell, the heart went out of her: she had left it at Monk's Dene. Her illness, four weeks after they moved, had been more than pneumonia: it had been a failure of spirit. She recoiled from the truth, that this time Edward had made a mistake – and took to her bed.

For Margot, discomforts and inconveniences counted for nothing compared to the change in her mother. It struck her afresh as Sarah shuffled into the room, having succeeded in dressing herself for the first time for over a month.

‘You should have waited. I was coming.' She helped her to a chair and put a rug over her knees.

‘Sit down for a few minutes.'

They faced each other across the hearth. The greater change was in Sarah, but Margot too was thinner, paler, more serious. The burden had fallen most heavily on her, but the worst was over. The nurse was gone, and, as they frequently reminded each other, most of the difficulties were temporary. In six months, Alex would have taken his degree. There would be a place for him with an Elmdon firm dealing mainly with company law and he could live at home.

Mrs Roper was a sad loss. She gave them a day occasionally but could not be longer away from her husband who suffered from pneumoconiosis. Maud had left to be married. The Todds, a couple already housed in one of the cottages, were helpful and Bessie did simple cookery. The daily woman who walked or cycled from Fellside was reliable as times were hard and the work welcome. But resident help was essential. Despite their problems, Sarah persisted in waiting for a suitable person to respond to their advertisement: to be saddled with an unsuitable one would, she foresaw, be purgatory.

Meanwhile, one successful outcome of the mammoth undertaking, the only one, perhaps, was the employment of Ewan Judd as handyman. For the first time in his life he had a regular job.

‘It's given him a bit of pride in himself,' his mother said. He had ceased to smoulder with resentment, was occasionally heard to whistle as he chopped wood and dug beds for vegetables and had been seen to smile.

‘A transformation.' Edward was enthusiastic. ‘And there's so much more we can do in saving men from the scrapheap of unemployment.' He dwelt on the theme. It replaced an earlier one that women should have careers and learn to be independent. Margot had gone back to school for the autumn term. A fortnight later came the removal. For another fortnight she had managed the hour-long journey from Langland to Elmdon, not including the walk to Fellside station, until the alarming onset of her mother's illness.

‘You can take up your studies again,' her father said, ‘when things are more settled. I'm not sure that your health would stand up to university life.'

In the emergency, Margot scarcely gave a thought to her studies or the university, as on a sinking ship a desperate passenger discards personal belongings and takes to the lifeboat. When the crisis was over and Sarah took a turn for the better, mother and daughter were often alone when workmen had gone home, except for the Todds and Ewan, who was proving unexpectedly reliable and inoffensive. Ferocious as the Judds could be in defence of their own, they could be equally pig-headed in loyalty to their friends. The Humberts, especially Miss Margot, had been kind to Katie and were accepted as partisans in the guerrilla war against a hostile world.

Margot was about to tear herself away from the fire when heavy footsteps in the uncarpeted hall announced the approach of Ewan with a trug of wood and three letters in unfamiliar handwriting.

‘Nothing from Alex. But these – surely one of them will be from the treasure we're looking for.' Margot skimmed them. But neither a widow used to looking after a titled lady with a completely staffed household, nor a Scottish woman aged sixty and not afraid of rough work, nor an eighteen-year-old from Cornwall would serve their purpose.

‘If only we could have the titled lady's complete staff. How very satisfactory that would be.'

They amused themselves with talk of butlers and ladies' maids while Ewan stacked logs on the hearth.

‘Some time when you've got your coat on' – he addressed Margot – ‘you'd maybe like to come and choose a Christmas tree. There's plenty up there at the back of them ruins.'

‘I hadn't thought.… It's still three weeks.… It won't be the usual kind of Christmas. Or do you think we might manage the party on Boxing Day? Just ourselves, Phyllis and Freda of course, Linden and Miles and a few others.' Her spirits rose as she remembered how wonderful last year's Christmas party had been.

‘We'll have to see.' They were the words Sarah had used when they were children begging for some treat. She smiled – and as with the momentary lifting of a cloud, life became normal again.

When Alex came home all was well. Together they explored the sixteen rooms, discussed their possibilities and decided on one for Lance, who came in time to drive Mrs Roper back and forth from Ashlaw and to help with Christmas preparations. The heavy curtains were at last hung in the galleried hall; a tree was installed; decorations were unearthed from cardboard boxes. Mrs Roper made mince-pies, brought puddings and dressed the turkey. Father arrived from London laden with parcels.

On the day before Christmas, fields were white with snow. Miles telephoned in the morning to ask if he might call. Watching for him from the sitting-room window, Margot saw the desolate landscape transfigured – or rather failed to see it at all except as a backcloth for the scenario of Miles's arrival.

She was roused from the trance of expectation by a variation in the scene. It was snowing again and through the flurry of flakes she could just make out a moving shape down by the barn, a darkness in the surrounding whiteness. Not a car. A person? Then it was gone – or had never been there. There was nothing but snow: nothing to think of but Miles.

It was a quarter of an hour before he arrived. To him the house seemed warm and full of people. He had last seen it as a wreck of a place and felt some embarrassment in coming. It was an awkwardness dispelled by Alex's greeting, ‘Here comes our landlord. How are you, old chap?'