A Hint of Witchcraft (17 page)

But it wasn't Miles. The young man in shirtsleeves and waistcoat was an under-gardener. He reached her, breathless.

‘There's bad news up at the house, miss. It's the master. He was taken ill in the night and' – the lad's lips trembled – ‘he's gone. He passed away not above an hour ago.' He took an envelope from his pocket. ‘Mr Miles sent this.'

‘Mr Rilton!' It was hard to believe. He had always been there, all her life, and before him there had been other Mr Riltons, a long line of presences seldom seen, almost invisible, yet known to exercise power like the forces of nature, like the weather.

‘Nothing's going to be the same, miss, now that he's gone. There's rare comings and goings up there at the house. I'll need to get back as quick as I can.'

‘Of course. Tell Mr Miles how sorry I am and if there's anything we can do for Mrs Rilton.…'

Dear Margot,
Miles had written in haste,
I tried to telephone you at the Hall but you had already left. Grandfather has died suddenly. It has been a fearful shock. I shall be kept here, there is so much to do. I'm deeply disappointed not to see you, more than I can say, much much more. But it must be soon, please.…

Brightness had gone from the morning. She read the letter again and again, then turned to walk slowly homeward. By the low birch bough she paused, reluctant to go beyond the radius of Miles's influence. Since she had passed this spot only a few minutes ago everything had changed. The news saddened but could not grieve her, as she had barely known the old gentleman. The families were not on visiting terms, with the exception of that one momentous visit – as she had come to think of it – when the dedication of the memorial had brought them all together. He had called at the Hall when the tenancy was discussed. She remembered his voice and his courteous goodbye.

But to have missed seeing Miles did grieve her. It was more than disappointment, rather a sense of his having been abruptly withdrawn, leaving her forlorn and anxious. In the dreary days of winter she had looked forward eagerly to their reunion. It had not happened. She would always think of it, the lost hour, as more sadly beautiful than any actual meeting could be.

With each step that carried her away from him, that mediocre portion of her existence in which he had no part reasserted itself. The mild air, the sky of tender blue between branches and the elasticity of youth caused her to loiter, reluctant to creep home tamely, having left it with wings outspread. She was still much nearer to Bainrigg House than to the Hall. Though it would not be a pleasant thing to do, here was an opportunity to carry out an experiment she had long had in mind. She turned back.

From the stone-pit she saw that the double gates of Bainrigg House were closed. There was no one about: they would all be occupied with the emergency. She had the whole landscape of fields, hedges and trees to herself. In a few minutes she had reached the iron gates, turned her back on them and looked down the field path leading to the chimney two fields away. It was slightly to the right of the ash tree. She could see it clearly though not its base. It seemed in some way changed. For the whole length of the first field the path ran parallel with the hedgerow unimpeded by any outgrowth. Walking steadily, she could see the chimney all the way to the first five-barred gate. In the next field the hedge curved here and there, bulging over the ditch, but the path also curved at those points so that the chimney and ash tree remained clearly visible to anyone walking from Bainrigg to the beginning of Clint Lane – though, she reminded herself, last June the trees would be in full leaf.

How long had Miles remained at his garden gate that day after Linden left him? From it he had seen Katie near the chimney. Linden had not seen her – or so she said. She might not have been looking. But it is hard not to see another person moving in an otherwise deserted countryside. Margot had already unhappily considered the possibility that Katie had seen Linden and had been in such dread of meeting her that she had clambered into the nearest hiding-place. Supposing at this moment someone in pink were to appear by the chimney – she could now see it from top to base – would it be possible to avoid seeing her?

The effect of such thoughts was to raise once again the frightened ghost of Katie, her eyes panic-stricken, her fair hair rising from her head as if electrified; to revive the sadness; to wonder why, if Linden had seen Katie, she should deny having seen her, and to remind herself that a person who lies can never be believed.

How strange – it really was a coincidence – that the thief should come unexpectedly upon the scapegoat in this lonely place, that Linden should come within hailing distance of the one person who might be the means of her undoing. If ever Katie should be sufficiently clear in her wits to declare her innocence, she might not be believed, but suspicion could fall on the only other person who had been in the shop alone. Linden had taken the risk, confident that Katie's guilt would be taken for granted. But if she saw Katie run in panic to the chimney would she try to stop her? She knew that the chimney was dangerous; Margot herself had told her and had blushed for her own officiousness. Linden had certainly not stopped Katie, might indeed not have seen her, but Margot remembered the first time the two had met under the pear tree on the garden path at Monk's Dene, and her own dismayed impression that for Linden Katie simply didn't exist. She was not merely to be overlooked but to be seen and dismissed as less than human. Would Linden, cool and composed as ever, watch Katie go to her death?

Margot faced the horror in which she was involving herself and recognized it as sheer supposition of the most shameful kind – to suppose that Linden could have walked sedately back to Monk's Dene that day, relaxed in the garden (how elegantly even in a deck-chair!), eaten strawberries, knowing all the time where Katie was and
never mentioning it.
Impossible, even though to a person willing to let Katie take the blame for what she herself had done, Katie's permanent disappearance must have been a relief, though not an unqualified relief. Later in the evening as anxiety for Katie intensified, Linden had seemed out-of-sorts and pleaded fatigue, realizing perhaps how her behaviour would be seen if it were ever found out. Had she gone down on her knees and prayed that it never would be?

There was another possibility even worse, and not to be thought of. It was bleak comfort to feel that sheer indifference would prevent Linden from deliberately contriving Katie's death; to know and not care what happened at the chimney was bad enough. Was not indifference in itself a source of evil?

With a sense of increasing darkness, Margot groped her way to an imperfect understanding of what it was that from the beginning had made Linden seem different. The difference lay, not in anything she did – what did she ever do? – but in the nature of her being. She had only to be there to cause harm. At closer quarters the glamour faded as tinsel fades, leaving unadorned a heartless disregard of others.

The most maddening thing about Linden, she felt with a rush of resentment, was that one could never stop thinking about her. She herself was as much her prey as Alex was. One way and another she had been thinking about her for years, passing from admiration to doubt, mistrust and condemnation. She was never free of her. It was as if she cast a spell inducing love or fear or hatred (why did Ewan hate her?) – a contamination she was able to spread without having suffered the disease. Was that the secret of all witchcraft – the ability to change others while remaining unchanged?

Margot had come to the chimney and saw why it had seemed different. Disputes over its future were still unresolved and it had been encased in heavy barbed-wire. Visually it was not a change for the better. The dignified if melancholy relic had become a fabulous monster pointing a multitude of wicked darts: a thing to be fled from. She turned and saw Mrs Dobie coming from the direction of Larsons' farm. Sombrely dressed in her long black coat and deep-crowned black hat, she might have been sent to restore order in a situation of moral confusion. More simply, here was a person who knew right from wrong.

She may have been surprised at Margot's readiness in coming to meet her and by the warmth of her greeting. Her black-laced boots came to a halt.

‘You're a stranger here these days.' She was a little out of breath. Exercise had deepened the petunia shades of her complexion. Otherwise she was little changed from the day when she had poured scorn on the memorial service, a solidly real human being mercifully free of so much as a nodding acquaintance with Linden Grey. To see her was like being rescued from a stormy emotional sea.

‘It's a lovely day for a walk, Mrs Dobie.'

‘Aye, but you'll have heard the news. It's a sad loss for them up at the House.' Mr Rilston had been less than two hours dead but Margot knew that by this time the news would have spread throughout Ashlaw. ‘The world's forever changing. Mr Miles is young to be taking over. The lad could do with a bit of hardening for the toil and worry ahead of him. If you ask me he's too gentle and dreamy for this world. And how's your mother going on, love? Mrs Roper tells me she's been real poorly. She's been sadly missed in Ashlaw, has Mrs Humbert. We don't see much of the new agent's wife. They say Mrs Ainsley doesn't like the house being right in the village. Ashlaw isn't smart enough for her. It seems she's from Australia and never wanted to come here in the first place. It wouldn't surprise me if they upped and left all of a sudden. There'd be no tears shed if she went back to where she belongs. Only it would be a sad sight to see the blinds drawn again at the agent's house and your old garden getting out of hand – and then strangers coming.'

Margot walked back with her towards Clint Lane, stifling the homesickness for Monk's Dene she had unintentionally revived. They exchanged other news of births and deaths in the village, of the laying out of smallholdings at Langland, where two cottages were now occupied. Margot asked after the Larsons.

‘Well enough, but too much out of the way of other folks. Little Rosie would be better for other bairns to play with. She's getting airy-fairy with being so much on her own. Talking to herself and dressing up in her mother's clothes, with flowers in her hair. There'll be no brothers or sisters for her either, from what Nancy tells me.'

By the chimney they parted.

‘Mrs Dobie,' she said, as the old woman turned to go, ‘may I ask you something?'

‘There's no harm in asking.' She had seen that the girl was troubled: knew that she had been overworked. She was a sweet-looking girl, a regular ray of sunshine when she was little, now quiet and large-eyed.

‘It's nothing personal, just a thing I sometimes think about. If you knew that something was wrong, you'd speak up about it, wouldn't you? You wouldn't let it be covered up?'

Mrs Dobie looked her up and down, then with a gesture indicated the village below, its roofs sheltered by the ridge.

‘There's hardly a house down there where there isn't something wrong, nor a human being that hasn't some weight of trouble to bear. There's as many wrongs covered up and never spoken of as there are grains of sand on the shores of all the oceans in the world.' She was not, as Alex used to say, breathing fire: she spoke quietly, an old woman whom life has saddened.

‘Do you mean that it's better to leave things covered up?'

‘There's no knowing which is better. Sometimes you have to speak out. When? When your own conscience tells you to. But if covering it up makes you unhappy, let it out. You'll get no thanks for it but you might feel better.'

She must make up her own mind. It was comforting to know that even so wise a woman as Mrs Dobie was sometimes doubtful as to what was the right thing to do. She was looking at the chimney, now cruelly encaged and when she spoke again her words touched so nearly her own thoughts that Margot felt a superstitious chill.

‘And there's been wrong done here at this very place where we're standing. What'll come of it no one knows. Things sometimes come out of their own accord without anyone telling – and one wrong leads to another as sure as I'm standing here.'

She was standing there no longer – was already moving away.

‘Goodbye, Mrs Dobie. I'm so glad we met.'

‘And so am I, if it was just to see that you haven't lost that friendly smile. You'll tell your mother I was asking after her?'

*   *   *

Alex came home two days later. Margot met him at Fellside station. They walked home, leaving his luggage to be delivered.

‘You're very quiet.' Alex broke off an entertaining account of a battle of wits with his tutor. ‘Something up?'

‘Well, yes. I'll tell you later. This evening perhaps. You'll want to talk to Mother first.'

‘The suspense will kill me,' he said cheerfully.

And when in his room that evening she told him, Margot had some idea of how it might feel to commit murder. It was a kind of death that she inflicted, though not on him: it was Linden as she had seemed to be who abruptly ceased to exist. Half-a-dozen words were enough to shatter her image beyond hope of repair.

For once he had nothing to say. They sat in painful silence. She was alarmed at the damage she had done and waited anxiously until he spoke. The walls were thick but they kept their voices low like conspirators discussing the disastrous failure of a secret enterprise.

‘You've known this since Christmas? Why, for heaven's sake, have you kept it to yourself? Are you sure you haven't imagined the whole thing?'

‘How could I imagine such a thing when I thought her so wonderful?' At first, she mentally added. It seemed a long time ago. In her distress she found it hard to remember the circumstances that one by one had shaken her faith. ‘I'm simply telling you what Toria said she saw.'

‘Do we have to believe that ghoul of a woman?'