A Hint of Witchcraft (26 page)

‘I didn't think he was that sort of a man.' Jenny got back into bed.

‘It only takes that sort of a woman,' Elsie struck a match and looked at the clock. It was twenty-five past one.

‘And she's one of that sort, you can mark my words.' Bella already knew plenty about Miss Grey and the temptation to pass it on was irresistible.

*   *   *

The two men running across the lower end of Pennybit field arrived neck-and-neck at the main road. Only when sheltered by the hedge did they pull off the balaclavas that had masked their faces. But they didn't look at each other nor had they spoken a word since they left Bainrigg. Darkness was no problem: they knew their terrain too well. In fact, the rapid retreat had been the best part of the whole rotten business: it had restored their badly shaken self-esteem.

‘If you ever breathe a word of this to anybody else, I'll break every bone in your body,' Rob said when he had got his own breath back.

Ewan swore. He was too disgusted with himself to speak otherwise. They'd made a right mess of it. For one thing they hadn't been ready. All they had intended was to spy out the land and see if they could get into the gardens at Bainrigg House without being seen. It had been a bit of a lark like when they were lads sneaking off with their balaclavas on to do a bit of poaching. They had a plan all right, to shove her into the ditch and give her a fright. It was nothing but fair, the least they could do for Katie's sake: the sort of thing the woman concerned wouldn't mind seeing done to others. But it was all in the air, for some time in the future. To start with it meant getting her on her own and there wasn't much chance of that. They'd have to work something out the next time Rob came home.

From the shrubbery they had watched the nobs leaving. So far as could be seen from the headlights and the light from the house there was a Bentley, an Armstrong-Siddely and what looked like an American car. Some folks had money to burn and there were bairns in Potters Yard without boots to their feet. Then, just as they were themselves leaving,
she
was there, all by herself and coming towards them. It was a shock. They might have gone there night after night for years and never seen her alone and it had to be this one night when they weren't ready.

He hadn't expected it to be like that. Smashing windows with bricks was one thing, but laying hands on a woman with intent to punish her was another thing altogether. Especially a woman like that. The plan had been simple, but their sudden actual contact with her made it unworkable. Her perfume, her delicacy, the feel of her clothes, the indications even in the dark that she was a creature used to protection and therefore helpless – made it distasteful even to touch her. To hustle her through the gate and into the field was as much as he could bring himself to do. It was Rob who had pulled off that bit of white fur and chucked it in the ditch. He himself had done nothing; had stood like a stook. There had been a terrible moment when, nonplussed, they hadn't known what to do next until by mutual consent they had taken themselves off at full speed, saved by their own decency.

He was ashamed of it. He had gone soft. He hated her, more than ever, but for the life of him he could not have harmed her. The likes of her were untouchable by the likes of him. It was not a compliment. The girls he was familiar with would never have got him into a mess like this. For that matter they would never do anything as shabby as what she had done and deserved to be punished for.

And there was something else, harder to explain. At close quarters faintly visible in the surrounding darkness, she hadn't seemed real. It was uncanny, the feeling that if he had brought himself to touch her, there would have been nothing to hold. Inside the soft outer covering there was nothing: not merely no warmth, no angry protest, no response, but an absence of life as he knew it. On her feet and breathing, she was less alive than Katie in her grave.

‘I'll tell you what' – Rob was deeply in earnest – ‘I'll be glad to get back to sea.'

Neither felt like going home.

‘What about seeing if Lily'll let us have a pint?'

‘At this time of night?'

‘She won't mind. She sleeps downstairs. The old man won't know.'

Both thought of Lily with something like affection. She was the kind of girl they knew, a better class of girl altogether.

Feet firm on the road, they stepped out briskly, the only moving objects in a silent world, and gradually they became less conscious of the fields on their left, dark and disaster-ridden, of the big house shrouded in trees and of their foiled escapade (whose further outcome was certainly not of their choosing). The air was fresh on their faces. Above them stretched the vast canopy of the sky, the wheeling constellations and myriads of stars.

‘What good would it have done Katie anyway?' Rob demanded. ‘Humbling her, I mean. It couldn't make any difference to Katie.'

Katie had escaped to another region somewhere between the earth and the distant stars – and yet – it was a queer feeling, Ewan thought, and would take a bit of understanding – but in a way she was here, as close as the bramble stems in the hedge where she had picked blackberries and the milestones where as a little girl she had liked to sit.

Ahead on the right, darkness thickened in the shape of a building. It was the Halfway House Inn. He saw it through tears.

CHAPTER XIX

Miles's new-found firmness of purpose lasted. How long? Certainly while Linden was recovering from a feverish chill, the result of shock and exposure. He went to Gordon Street every day with flowers, fruit and wine. She was charmingly grateful, her eyes on his face, her smile winsome. The bedroom door was left ajar while he was with her. Occasionally Mrs Grey came to arrange pillows or to bring a cooling drink.

‘Linden has never been troubled with colds. It's going to take time.'

Languid against her pillow in a mist of artificial silk and lace, her face wan in its frame of dark hair, Linden was fortunate in having been spared the less attractive aspects of a chill: reddened nose, puffy eyes, thickened speech. He felt heavy-footed, too tall for the flimsy bedroom chair, but he continued also to feel strong and firm in his intention to see her safely through her illness and to make amends for the outrage she had suffered. He saw no reason to tell her that he had alerted the local police, nor for that matter, had PC Pratt seen any reason to tell him that there was talk about Miss Grey in the village.

Miles felt no urgent longing, no physical compulsion to take her in his arms: she did not stir his flesh. The embrace in the drawing-room had been pleasant but involuntary. He saw her as a precious external object, a prize dropped in his way by the whirligig of time, a safeguard against unbearable loneliness.

As long as she remained an invalid needing rest and restoratives, he was happy, in the gentleness of his nature, to look after her. He could overlook her failure to read any of the books she so politely thanked him for, and later her indifference as to where they went when he took her for a drive, her ignorance of the countryside and her inability to distinguish one historic ruin from another. Absorption in his new role kept him cheerful and attentive.

‘It's taking a long time,' Mrs Grey murmured. ‘But we mustn't take any risks, must we?'

It took a surprisingly long time, almost a month, before Linden was well again – well enough, presumably, to go back to work. Unfortunately, her absence was found to have made so little difference that the Empsons, father and son, now felt able to dispense with her services altogether.

‘I don't know what we shall do, I'm sure.' Mrs Grey accepted a glass of wine and sighed.

It was one of the frequent occasions when Miles brought the Greys out to Bainrigg and left Mrs Grey with his grandmother while he took Linden for a drive, returning for afternoon tea. By this time the Greys were sufficiently at home to stay almost until dinner-time.

‘I shall have to find something else,' Linden said bravely, stifling the worrying trace of a lingering cough behind a lace-edged handkerchief.

Miles instantly felt responsible. Her dismissal was the direct result of the wretched affair that had also caused her illness. Some delicacy had been needed in persuading Linden to let him provide the means of replacing her damaged clothes. As it happened the dress was from Liberty's and was not yet paid for: it was a simple matter to send a cheque. The value of the fur wrap (a gift from Godfrey Barford) was more difficult to assess until Linden found a similar one in a furrier's catalogue. The slippers had come from Wares before their refusal to give further credit. Miles was also determined to pay the doctor's bills.

As the attack on Linden was a secret between the two of them, Mrs Grey must not know of these transactions. In addition, Miles felt the awkwardness of paying bills from local firms with cheques bearing his signature. It seemed best to give the money in notes directly to Linden and leave her to settle. Altogether the sums involved a bigger withdrawal from his personal account than he had made for years.

But the secrecy strengthened their intimacy. His thoughts, his attention were fixed on Linden. Day after day there was something to be done for her and information to share. And now.…

‘I don't know, I'm sure,' Mrs Grey said again.

Ought he to take on the responsibility of finding Linden something else to do, as she so pluckily put it?

‘We must try to think of something.' Mrs Rilston's vague contribution reflected her ignorance not only of the present peculiar situation but of the entire labour market.

‘At least she's looking more like herself,' Mrs Grey said.

They all looked at Linden, now fully restored to health. Indeed it was hard to believe that she had ever been ill, and on Great-grandmother Rilston's velvet-cushioned chair she seemed, in her simple and expensive-looking dress of cornflower blue, as fitting a feature of the room as one of the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece. As familiar – as permanent?

Perhaps even then, trapped as he was by conscience and the need to make amends, Miles's confidence wavered. She was beautiful, composed and at ease, an ornament to the room, but despite her unemployed state she was no longer pitiable, no longer a lost lamb to be shepherded softly into the fold. The enfolding had already to some extent been accomplished. The role of the shepherd was less clear. The thought ‘What's to be done with her now?' without actually taking shape threatened a faint disquiet.

As the bond that united them – her need, his pity – stretched thinner, other bonds were strengthened. In the eyes of their small world they had become a pair. ‘The young people'. ‘You two.…' Linden's sparse remarks were sprinkled with ‘Miles and I', and there were stronger hints from Mrs Grey who had drawn her own conclusions from the late return on the night of the dinner-party and Miles's sudden attentiveness.

‘You must not keep Linden out late, Miles. There must be no more – talk.'

Miles was unaware that there had been any talk, as for a while was Mrs Rilston, until she was waylaid one morning by her housekeeper.

‘I think it right to tell you, ma'am' – Mrs Beale's manner was distant – ‘that there's talk among the maids.'

The talk, Mrs Rilston was astonished to hear, was about Miss Grey. It also involved Mr Miles, but the unpleasantness derived from Miss Grey. Things were being said in the village which it was not Mrs Beale's business or intention to repeat. At first she had listened to the tittle-tattle, but when it came to such nonsense as a ghost in Lucknow meadow, the ghost of a girl in pink seen early in the morning and once just as it was getting dark, she had put a stop to it at once. But when gossip centred on the House she felt it her duty to report it. She would do her best but she could not guarantee that Miss Grey would be shown the respect that guests at Bainrigg House had always in her time received.

‘But why ever not?' Mrs Rilston demanded, already confused.

When the drawing-room had been ‘done' on the morning after the dinner-party, there had been signs – Mrs Beale hesitated – of irregularity. An intimate item of underwear had been found, the furniture had been disarranged and Mr Rilston had been seen to carry Miss Grey to his car in the early hours of the morning. Informally dressed.

‘Thank you, Mrs Beale. You were right to tell me. And I must tell you that any servant in my house who fails to show proper respect to any of my guests will be dismissed instantly.'

Since the war there had been a laxity unknown in her young days though she had no personal experience of it. She felt the news too unpleasant to be passed on to Mrs Grey, but after some thought she did pass on an edited version to Miles. Linden Grey was evidently not the girl she had taken her for but she was the only girl available whom Miles might be induced to marry – and marry he must for a number of reasons including his own mental health, not to mention her own. She could not be solely responsible for his variations of mood and lack of direction: she was too old and too tired to be worried any more.

‘I'm surprised that you allowed yourself to be drawn into a situation which would cause talk among the maids – and even more surprised that Linden should behave in such a way. But it can be remedied and I for one shall be happy to forget it when you confirm the attachment in the proper way' – and almost immediately, it seemed to Miles, she produced the emerald ring which had been her own mother's.

Even so he made no decision, and indecision throughout the winter months proved fertile ground for the growth of an ‘understanding'. It was not until April that, desiring nothing else, he accepted the inevitable: and Linden accepted the emerald with modest acquiescence and the words: ‘Oh, Miles, it really is beautiful.' Nothing was said about love and briefly he felt at ease. For once he was behaving like everyone else.