A Hint of Witchcraft (24 page)

Her thoughts moved to someone else who needed it as, through the gatehouse arch, she saw Margot walking up the slope, at her heels the cat that followed her everywhere. Toria gave no sign, but she was disappointed when Margot stopped, then turned to wander aimlessly back to the house. They might have talked; the girl needed help. If Toria had one wish left unfulfilled it was to be of help to Margot, to support and comfort her as she would a daughter of her own.

With the perception of a caring observer she was aware of the girl's loneliness, separated from her friends, from her brother, bereft of her mother and, for some reason hard to understand, from young Mr Rilston. The idea that Toria Link could be a source of comfort to her employer's daughter might be dismissed as presumptuous. Toria would have understood such an attitude and would have remained indifferent to it. Solitude and suffering had not exhausted but rather intensified an inward energy that wrongly directed could be harmful. But to love and protect the loved one? What harm could there be in that? It was a question she had asked herself before, long ago, but then the answer had been forced upon her: now she could act as she chose.

Margot had paused on the step of the back door as if unwilling to go in. The dull thud of the heavy door as she closed it behind her roused Toria from her meditations. It was past midday and her resting place was now in the shade. She and Bessie Todd were going to put up curtains in the room being prepared for Miss Bondless. She went back to the house, pausing to snap off dead flowerheads in the back garden – they looked untidy. Her concern for the Hall and its well-being had grown with her concern for its inhabitants.

As she swept the path clear of dead leaves, Ewan came round from the front with a barrowload of clippings and soon had a bonfire going. Toria added her sweepings. As the smoke rose blue against the green slope beyond, Ewan said abruptly: ‘I went home last night. Our Rob's home. We got talking.…'

Toria listened while the blue smoke turned grey in air still golden but cooler than it had been an hour ago. Jackdaws gathered on the gatehouse and after a medley of raucous calls flew off again.

‘… and we think now it wasn't Katie.' Garden fork in hand, Ewan stared into the fire, unconscious of the peculiar intensity of interest he had roused. ‘There was someone else that could have taken them.' He hurled another forkful of dead leaves on to the heap, deadening the blaze. ‘How do we know that it wasn't her that took them? The only one in the shop … the only one up there by the chimney.…' That was a thought to brood on and be sickened by. ‘She needn't think she can get away with it.'

‘You'll never be able to prove it.' Toria had been slow to respond. ‘Unless somebody saw her.'

‘Nobody could prove it was Katie unless somebody saw her. Never mind about proving: she's going to suffer for it, I can tell you that. You know what I told you about that pedlar woman. She said, “Maybe you'll be down in the muck yourself some day”. What if she was right, eh?'

‘It's what she deserves, the one you're talking about, but remember, she's not worth you or your Rob going to prison for or losing your job here for. Give a thought to that before you do anything you'll regret.'

‘Don't you worry. There's all sorts of ways, but it needs to be done soon before she gets herself set up in Bainrigg House and being lady of the manor and living on rents from the likes of the boss here and owning all this land we're standing on.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘She's set on marrying Mr Miles, that's what I mean.'

He stepped back as a tongue of flame leapt from the bonfire – and turning, he was struck by a change in Toria. It was for a moment as if the fierce heat came from her too; as if, revelling in the blaze, she too was alight.

But he was disappointed in her reaction to his news. He had expected her to share his renewed sense of the injustice of life, or at least to say a few harsh things about the abominable Miss Grey. Instead, she had looked … cheerful was hardly the word, but he couldn't find another for the absence of a glumness he had grown used to. It hadn't lasted (he glanced at her again) and she no longer looked as if she had been lit up inside, but she hadn't said a word, not a word. He wished he hadn't told her. Well, you never could tell with Toria. If she was absolutely sane, pigs might fly. He spat on his palms, seized the handles of the wheelbarrow and trundled off, his mood morose.

Toria stood gazing at the bonfire until the flame narrowed and became a sword. Was it a sign? Was it an answer to her prayer that she might be of help: a confirmation of her belief that she had been sent to Langland to be of service to those who needed her? Not just to serve with hands and on willing feet, but to act as an intermediary in bringing low the evil-doer, the woman who, for over a year, she had held it in her power to shame, whose good name she could in a breath destroy?

But she had grown cautious. While struggling to survive, she had seemed to hear the voice of Jehovah telling her what to do. His commands had been clear and simple to match her needs, as a person on the point of death sees life shorn of its distracting trivialities. But in returning to a more normal existence, albeit only to its fringe, she was aware of complexities which had not concerned her as an outcast.

She had learned that help, however well meant, could be two-edged. She had helped to rescue Mr Alex from his entanglement with the same cold-hearted woman, but in setting him free she had also left Miss Grey free, to worm her way into Bainrigg House and perhaps to break Miss Margot's heart, to queen it, as Ewan had said, over the very earth on which she herself now stood. It was wrong. It should be stopped. But how? Surely not by some clumsy interference by the Judd brothers who would very likely come off worst in any attack on Miss Grey.

Whatever they did, they would be meddling in matters she had taken upon herself. The secret had been hers. She had promised to keep it, but they had found it out and had stolen from her the right to use it in her own way and at the right time.

The crimson flame died down, leaving no more than a glow in the heart of the smouldering heap. The colour was gone but the heat remained. She turned away, uncertain, her hard-won peace of mind disturbed. How would young Mr Rilston feel if she told him who had been responsible for Katie Judd's death? Would it matter to him? She didn't know what sort of man he was. What sort of man would prefer Miss Grey to Miss Margot?

She had thought of him as one of the honourable sort, a perfect gentleman but rather shy. It was possible he didn't even know (though it was plain enough to Toria) that he was all the world to Miss Margot. A friendly hint might be enough to make him realize the mistake he was making. She yearned to be of help to those who had befriended her. Was it not for that very purpose that she had been sent here? Her coming had surely been ordained.

Toria's upbringing had been godly: she had never played a game of cards or dominoes, but she knew what happened when the pieces were stood on end and one of them fell. It might be safer not to interfere again – not yet. She would know when the time came.

CHAPTER XVIII

‘Beg pardon, ma'am.' It was Bella nervously acting as parlour-maid while Jenny was at the dentist's. ‘It's Henderson. He's asking for the master.'

‘Mr Rilston won't want to be disturbed. What does Henderson want?'

‘It's about a drainpipe, ma'am.'

‘Then Mr Rilston will be either in his study or in the summer-house.'

Mrs Rilston went to the window. From her sitting-room the summer-house was out of sight, screened from the north by trees. It was a timber building and stout enough to be wind-proof though hardly suitable for use at this time of the year even with the paraffin heater she had insisted on. But presently she saw Henderson limping across the garden in its direction. If not in his study Miles must be there.

She was worried about him. For the past three months he had been withdrawn, altogether uncompanionable. Meal-times had become constrained and awkward. If only Frederick were here! She wept a little. At the back of her mind was the thought that Miles's mother had been subject to what was tactfully called depression: in fact, there had been times.… It had not been an inconsolable sorrow, though dreadfully sad of course, when typhoid fever carried her off. They had hoped that their son would marry again but it was not to be.

So far there had been nothing actually strange in Miles's behaviour apart from his being so remote and unhappy. She had confided her anxiety to Mrs Grey who had agreed that he needed the company of younger people; it had also been agreed that if Linden could spare the time from her many engagements, she should come more often to Bainrigg.

‘It would be very good of her. I know she is popular and has many friends.' She was indeed the very girl, one of their own sort, to take Miles out of himself.

Consequently, rarely a week passed without a visit from the Greys. Sometimes Linden came alone; a friend would drop her off for an hour or two and pick her up again. She would bring Mrs Rilston something from town – an altered dress, matching embroidery silks, a library book. Mrs Rilston grew accustomed to having her there and so presumably did Miles though he never sat with them, was certainly never alone with Linden, greeted her pleasantly on his way upstairs to his study or out into the grounds but never stopped to talk. It was understood that he was collecting material for an article or possibly a book, on ecclesiastic life in northern England in the Middle Ages.

‘So much work entailed,' Mrs Rilston would explain helplessly, ‘but it gives him something to do and he is so very clever. Scholarly, you know.' If only he would hunt or shoot! There had never been a Rilston who didn't hunt or shoot.

At his table in the summer-house, Miles commanded a view of his own fields but more often his eyes rested on luminous clouds above distant hills, on the blaze of sunset, on a crescent moon. Before him a pile of unread books and a too-slim sheaf of notes served to remind him that in this sphere as in every other he was a failure: the article would never be finished, the book never written. There were days when he merely reread a few paragraphs written weeks ago without adding another word.

‘It's about the main drainpipe, sir,' Henderson explained. ‘It must have been fractured for quite a while. The damage first caught my eye when I came up from Ashlaw yesterday by the field path. I generally come in from the upper road, as you well know. I wondered why that ditch just outside the gate on the right-hand side was so wet, fairly brimming with water when there hasn't been that much rain. And coming through the gate into the garden, that bit of ground by the shrubbery is all soft and squelchy, and it doesn't smell too good.'

‘How does the pipe lie?'

‘So as to drain off at right-angles to that ditch and across Pennybit field to the main road.'

‘I'll come and look. We'd better get the council people.' It was an excuse to leave the causes of dispute between monks and lay brothers and to seem to be in charge of the estate.

Sure enough the ditch alongside the field nearest to the garden was water-logged and would probably remain so all winter. When Bella went home for her hour off that afternoon she found to her disgust that the path was ankle-deep in mud. Nobody had warned her. A good pair of shoes ruined!

‘I'm not going back that way.' She had popped into the Judds', hoping that Ewan would be there, but there was only Rob who would be joining his ship next day. ‘I'll have to go along nearly to the farm and then up the far side of the field.' She had to be back at four and spent most of her precious hour cleaning and polishing her shoes. ‘They say mud sticks and there was never a truer word.'

Visitors were coming to dinner: friends of Mr and Mrs Rilston who were staying in Elmdon on their way to Scotland and several other people, including Mrs and Miss Grey. ‘Needless to say.'

The dinner party passed off pleasantly. Mrs Rilston had been apprehensive: she had done so little entertaining since her husband's death but the Fenwicks were old friends, the Gillings and Roberts were local people and the Greys could always be relied on, Mrs Grey a sympathetic listener and Linden quietly voicing unremarkable remarks, so that there was no disharmony. Gavin Roberts, a few years older than Miles, entertained them with tales of his adventures at the newly formed flying club at Howlyn.

‘Why don't you join, Rilston? You've been up?'

‘Yes, two or three times.'

‘Flying's definitely the thing from now on, especially with the new de Havilland DH60. It's their latest, just out last year, with a welded steel fuselage. Come and have lessons. You'd get the hang of it in no time.'

‘So dangerous,' Mrs Rilston protested.

‘Not at all. It's almost monotonously safe, a jolly sight safer than going down a coal mine. You're in a world of your own up there in the clouds. Seeing the earth beneath you, you get things into proportion. Problems seem less important. You wonder what you've been worrying about.'

‘Gavin has no problems,' his wife said, ‘and very little to worry about.'

‘Not when I'm flying, dear.'

‘If ever there's another war, which God forbid, aircraft are bound to play a bigger part,' Mr Fenwick said. ‘There's something to be said for building up a strong air force, just in case.'

‘Don't even think of it on such a pleasant evening.' Mrs Fenwick preferred to talk to Miles about Oxford where her grandson was an undergraduate. Had there been any lull in the conversation there would have remained the pleasure of looking at Linden in her autumn dinner gown of parchment velvet with gold lamé at the neck and wrists.

‘Are she and Miles ..?' Mrs Fenwick whispered as the ladies went to the drawing-room.

‘I don't really know. Perhaps not yet but I do hope.… It would be very suitable.'