A Hint of Witchcraft (32 page)

‘You mean the woman your grandmother told you about?'

‘Her too, I dare say. She was no good either.'

Had she been rambling a little? She pushed her hat up from her forehead and eased herself upright. Margot lend a helping hand.

‘If he'd married her before he died, poor lad, all this would have passed to her. We'd have been in her hands instead of his. From what Ewan Judd says she doesn't look kindly on poorer folk. He saw the way she treated that pedlar woman at the bus-stop in Elmdon, as if she hadn't a drop of pity in her veins.… We've had a lucky escape if you can call it that when young Mr Rilston's dead before his time.'

She was not quite steady on her feet. Margot took her arm.

‘Let me walk home with you. You're tired.'

‘No, love, I'll be all right and there are plenty of doors I can knock on if need be. It's old age, that's all. There's nothing else the matter with me. Keep going, the doctor said.'

‘That would be Dr Lance,' Margot supposed, her tone resigned.

‘Everybody's taken to him, young and old. He's more than a good doctor – but I don't need to tell you that: you know him well enough.'

Margot watched her until she reached the first house in safety. Talking to Mrs Dobie was always interesting. As she walked slowly towards the farm, her mood was thoughtful. In a chain of events uniting all the members of her own small circle, new links were still emerging. Had everything happened simply at random, beginning with the freakish descent of a ball into a derelict mine shaft? She had passed the chimney but she could feel it between her shoulder blades; impotent now but sinister still; more sinister by far than in the unthinking days of childhood. Suppose things did not happen at random but were designed to compose some sort of pattern or to fulfil some purpose, as if, for example, her entirely voluntary visit to friends in Clint Lane had not been voluntary at all but was undertaken in obedience to a will not her own.

Eyes averted, she was aware of Bainrigg House on her right, secluded among trees, the life gone out of it; and she wished she had not come this way to hear talk of death and evil-doing.

Bracken grew tall beside the farmyard gate. She pushed it open and went slowly to the door. It was half open; there was no one about; even the dog was somewhere else. She raised her hand to knock and hesitated, unnerved by a stillness so deep that a blow-fly buzzing in one of the late roses had to be listened to. Her knock seemed an intrusion. Then feet sounded on the stairs and slip-slopped along the stone passage. The door opened wider. She looked down at a girl, a shy eight-year-old, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and with a look of having come from far away.

‘You must be Rosie.'

The child was fantastically dressed in a white lace curtain covering all but a few inches of her pink cotton frock: an ancient frilled mob-cap on her head, her mother's shoes on her feet and, round her neck, hanging down to her waist, a long string of pearl beads.

CHAPTER XXIV

‘Where did you get those beads?'

It's impossible, she told herself. There must be dozens of similar strings of beads. They couldn't be.… But she was too startled to be reasonable. For her, in her present mood and in this setting, the sudden appearance of the beads was a reappearance: they had come back: they could come and go according to their own ill will. The thing hanging round Rosie's neck had been the cause of so much distress that in those first agitated moments it seemed a fetish invested with unholy power.

She pulled herself together. They were ordinary beads. The falseness of the pearls was by now only too apparent: the lustre was flaking off and had left here and there a brown blob. They had not worn well.

Her question had been too abrupt. The child backed away, her lips quivering.

‘Where did you get the beads, Rosie?' she asked more gently. ‘I only asked because someone I know had beads like those.'

‘I found them.' The blue eyes upraised were candid like her mother's.

‘When? A long time ago?'

Rosie hesitated, pulled down her lower lip with her fore-finger and nodded vaguely. For her the month's holiday from school seemed to last for ever.

‘Where did you find them?'

Rosie pointed over the farmyard to the fields beyond.

‘Do you know who I am?'

‘Miss Humbert.'

‘Shall we ask your mother if you can show me where you found the beads?'

‘She's out. She's gone down to the village.'

‘We'll leave her a note. You go and change your shoes.'

She pencilled a note on a leaf from her pocket diary and put it on the kitchen table. Rosie ran upstairs and came back without the beads, the lace curtain and the mob-cap and in her own shoes. They set off hand in hand, ducked through a gap in the hedge in Lucknow meadow and became friends.

‘What did you mother say when you found the beads?'

‘I didn't tell her.'

‘It was a secret?'

‘For my treasure box.' There were other things in it: a ring from a lucky potato, a gold buckle, half a china lady (the top half), the lid of a tin with a ship on it.… Margot was interested, remembering a similar hoard.

‘You like dressing up?'

‘When I'm by myself and there's nobody to play with.'

They skirted the meadow, which sloped in the direction of the village, adjoining on its further side the long back gardens of houses in Ashlaw's main street.

‘I was looking for mushrooms. You have to pick them early in the morning. There weren't any but there were some apples. They'd fallen off that tree. I only picked them up, else they'd have been wasted.' She pointed to an apple tree, its branches leaning out over a garden wall. In the unmown grass by the wall there were windfalls, half eaten by rats or pecked by birds. ‘And while I was picking them up I saw the beads. Here.' She parted the leaves of a clump of ragwort by a narrow iron gate.

Margot looked over it into an old-fashioned garden and recognized it. The strawberry bed was at the bottom of the slope where it just escaped the shadow of the house and shop.

‘It wasn't stealing, was it? They were getting spoilt, lying there. They could have been there a long time, getting rained on.'

‘It wasn't stealing. Run home and tell your mother I'll come and see her another day.' A silver sixpence changed hands. Enraptured, Rosie ran off, stopping three times to wave before she disappeared through the hedge. It had been a very special day.

For Margot too. The beads were Miss Burdon's. It was highly unlikely that another identical string could have found its way to the gate at the top of her garden. Whoever stole them had dropped or deliberately left them. On the other hand – she shrank from a discovery so momentous – to imagine that Linden, immaculate in white, would be induced to scramble through a hedge rife with sticky-jacks and nettles into a pathless field, was ludicrous – as ludicrous as to imagine that having stolen the beads, she would make so bizarre and half-hearted an attempt to return them. One could believe that she might steal, and worse – much worse – but she would never risk spoiling her clothes. In any case, Linden, who never strayed from well-trodden paths, not in any sense, would neither know that Miss Burdon had a gate opening on a field nor how to reach it. If it was the thief who left the beads among the ragwort, the thief was not Linden.

Sheer dismay brought Margot literally to her knees. She sank down on the grass, gripping the bars of the gate for support. To her shame, she was disappointed. She wanted it to be Linden. She wanted to blame her for all that had gone awry. With an additional pang she remembered that she had told Alex that Linden had stolen the beads, and it wasn't true. Oh yes, she wanted desperately to see the flaking beads as a symbol of baseness beneath a glittering surface, to identify their falseness with Linden's.

And sadder still – she had been quick to believe that Katie had not taken the beads. But she must have done. She might have made a confused attempt to return them. Could she in her flight from the shop have hidden them in Church Lane, retrieved them (though dazed with fright), found her way to the back of Miss Burdon's garden and dropped them by her gate? It seemed unlikely that she would associate this gate, if she knew of it, with the shop in the main street. The whole enterprise, weird as it was, seemed too rational to be Katie's.

Her forehead on the iron bars, Margot saw between them the long slope of the garden; at the bottom, beyond the strawberry bed, the flagged path outside the scullery door and, further along, another door giving entry to the back shop. That had been Toria's territory. With relief she remembered that Toria had actually seen Linden take the beads. Her own assumption that Linden was to blame had rested on Toria's word.

Margot turned her face from the warm sun but it could not dispel the shock that set her shivering nor free her from the sensation of being plunged into sudden darkness. Suppose Toria had lied: the lie all the more convincing because part of her story was true? She could have stepped into the shop to rest for a few minutes in the shade and stand motionless among the bales of flannelette sheeting. She could have seen Katie come and go, leaving the shop empty. And then a few long strides would take her to the counter to snatch the beads, take them up the garden, drop them over the gate and come back to clean the scullery window, unnoticed, ignored, despised and rejected – the words would have been familiar to her – having doomed Katie to death and altered several lives.

But why? To incriminate Linden. ‘The only comfort I've had is knowing that I could ruin her', she had said; and later, only a few hours ago, ‘There's no punishment worse than to be put to shame for something you didn't do'. The similarity between events in Oxcote and in Ashlaw was now more striking. Perhaps in seeking to humiliate Linden for an earlier offence, Toria had drawn on her own experience, cherishing her secret for use when the time came.

To Margot, so intense a hatred seemed as crazy as Katie's fear, or for that matter, though briefly, as Alex's love. There was something about Linden that had a disturbing effect on others. Were there really people who served as instruments of evil like the witches of old, through no choice of their own? Such a person would be distinctive, in some way different. Linden had always been different. It was her difference that had intrigued the girls at school, including, more than most, herself. It was an uncomfortable thought.

Which of the three had taken the beads? Linden because she wanted them: Toria because she wanted to ruin Linden: Katie who wanted nothing in her entire life except to be safe?

Walking home through Priory Wood, Margot came to a decision. For her the incident was closed. Somehow she must put it from her mind. The questions it raised must remain unanswered. Nothing could be done without reviving unhappiness, and causing more. The homely fields were now haunted, so that a little girl gathering mushrooms in the early light became a ghost, and unimaginably strange things were being said in the village. People whose lives were drab and dangerous were surely entitled to enrich them by telling stories of weird happenings in their own countryside. It had always been so. The stories would last for a while: they would change in the telling and in time there would be no one left who knew how they began.

When she closed her curtains that night, Toria had not come back. The next day brought no sign of her. But on the third day she was heard in the woodshed, stacking logs as if she had never left off. She was best left alone. While engaged in so blameless an occupation, Margot thought with dawning cynicism, even Toria could do no harm – though with Toria one could never tell. A quiet woman who came down her crooked stair at dawn to kindle fire in the cold grate and climbed at nightfall to her narrow room, she had made the Hall her dwelling place and had become part of it.

She herself must find something else to think about – something absorbing and of an entirely different kind. In this she was to be, almost at once, completely successful.

CHAPTER XXV

Her father arrived home the next day. On the morning he left, he had heard news in Elmdon which made him cut short the conference in Derbyshire. His old enemy Bedlow had died.

‘Yes, the old blackguard has gone. It's strange, Margot, but I shall miss him. Couldn't stand the man, but his going leaves a gap. He was like no one else – and a good thing too, but he had guts and the tenacity of a bloodhound. The funeral is tomorrow. Could you take a look at my things, black tie and so on?'

‘You're going to the funeral?'

‘It's the least I can do, not to let enmity go beyond the grave.'

Margot got out and brushed the funeral trappings and saw him off the next morning. Her surprise at his unexpected respect for the old monster was nothing to her amazement at the news he brought back late in the afternoon. She had gone out to meet him as he got out of the car.

‘I can't get over it. You won't believe this. All these years and I had absolutely no idea.' He had dropped his hat on the ground and was staring at it absent-mindedly. Margot picked it up. ‘Of course there was no reason why we should have known. The situation had existed for years before we came to this district.'

‘Father! Tell me what has happened. I command you.'

‘Well, wait till you hear. Let's go inside. We'd better sit down. It concerns you too in a way.'

‘Then it isn't to do with old Bedlow?' It was disrespectful now that he was dead but she had never heard him spoken of in any other way.

‘Oh, but it is. Very much so.'

She marched him into the sitting-room and sat him down.

‘Now. Tell.'

‘I could do with a cup of tea, by the way.'

‘Not until.…'

‘Right. The fact is that Bedlow is – or was – Lance's grandfather.'

‘But.…'