A Hint of Witchcraft (9 page)

It was more surprising and particularly disappointing for Alex that Linden was also missing. Alex had called at Embletons' in the hope of seeing her but she wasn't there.

‘There was nobody there. According to the chap in the bookshop next door, the office is always closed on Saturdays.'

‘How strange! Linden said.…' What was it Linden had said? Had she misunderstood?

But Alex, fortunately perhaps, had gone to put out deck chairs and settle down to wait for her, feeling aggrieved that she had gone off like that. It was mid-afternoon when Linden sauntered in by the back gate and so round to the garden. Margot was lending a hand in the kitchen and didn't see the reunion. When she did join them she was aware of having interrupted an intimate conversation.

‘I'm so sorry, Margot, not to have been back in time for lunch. I must apologize to your mother.' Miles had been delayed at the chemist's. She had insisted on his driving straight to Bainrigg instead of coming round by Ashlaw. She had felt obliged to drop in for a few minutes to ask how Mrs Rilston was and had been persuaded to share an informal lunch and then to look round the garden. ‘It's delightful, isn't it?'

‘I've only seen it in winter,' Margot said, ‘when we went to invite Miles to the Christmas party.'

‘Naturally, Miles offered to run me home but I didn't feel that Mrs Rilston should be left. Besides, it's such a lovely day and downhill all the way. I was determined to walk home. Miles came with me part of the way, then I sent him back.'

*   *   *

She had come, though not suddenly, to a halt. A few yards ahead, iron gates in a wall marked the limit of the gardens and private grounds surrounding Bainrigg House. Beyond lay open fields.

‘You must let me go on alone,' she said, and although Miles did not protest and merely opened the gate to let her through, it was with a hint of persuasion, even of playful reproach that she added, ‘It wouldn't do, would it? People are so.… Well, you know what they're like.' With a slight inclination of her head she seemed to draw attention to the village in the valley below.

‘Oh, yes, rather.' Miles answered vaguely. He too was looking down over the fields. There was someone down there by the ash tree at the end of Clint Lane, someone in pink. Margot? Come to meet Linden? She had been wearing pink yesterday when he drove her to Langland Priory. ‘It's glorious, Miles,' she had said with the sun on her face and the wind in her hair. Her capacity for unreserved happiness delighted him.

Then he pictured her as she had been this morning in Church Lane. It was easy for him: he was always doing it. Her dress had been blue like the bowl of strawberries she held in both hands. He remembered that she wouldn't know that Linden had come to Bainrigg. Besides, he looked again – whoever it was had disappeared.

‘One has to be a little careful,' Linden was saying.

‘I suppose so.' He closed the gate, shutting her out, but she had seen his face light up in sudden eagerness, and had seen the light die. Was he disappointed that their time together had been cut short?

*   *   *

‘Did Miles say that he would be coming?'

‘Yes.' Linden smiled. ‘I believe he did.'

Something in her manner was irksome to Alex, depressing to Margot who was to recall every aspect, every incident of that day and, with particular clarity, Linden's part in it, including her impression that Linden had something on her mind, some preoccupation beneath the smooth flow of unexceptionable remarks. How useful they were in concealing the speaker's thoughts; how conveniently they could be adapted to falsify the truth. She had lied about the message to Mr Embleton. Now, at ease in the shade of the apple trees, she seemed – not exactly at one with the summer day – rather a visitant sent to enhance it with a touch of elegance, but not to be trusted. The discovery was startling.

‘Has Alex told you about Katie?'

He had not. He had found more important things to talk about. Certainly the unimportance of Katie was apparent in Linden's response to the news.

‘I don't suppose she knew what she was doing. She was certainly there on her own. I found her crouching by the counter. And then she was alone again when I went to call you. How upsetting for you all. But really – a string of cheap beads!'

It was possible to forget Miss Burdon while eating her strawberries. Lance ate rapidly and went back to the monastic seclusion of his room at home. The skeleton had been ousted, fortunately in theory only, by what he referred to as liver and lights. In the evening, the other three set Miles on his way home. He had come on foot with just such a contingency in mind. Alex and Linden walked slowly and he and Margot went on ahead.

‘How were the bluebells this year?'

‘They were lovely. I never saw so many.…'

Her prompt reply faded into hesitation. He loved her openness and her slight embarrassment. She saw his amusement and smiled, wishing all the same that she hadn't blurted it out like that. She could have said that they were always lovely, as if she hadn't bothered to come now that she was older. He must not know how often she had come through the Bainrigg gate – they had just reached it – and had wandered casually along the edge of the field to the stone pit and on to the wood. It had become her favourite walk in all weathers and although Miles was always at school and then at Oxford, or staying with his mother's relations, it was always possible that he might for once be there.

Now, as if filling in time until the others caught up, they turned to the left along the field's edge. Trees stood motionless in the faintly golden light of evening. The stone pit – how had they come so far? – was full of flowers – mullein, blue scabious and moon daisies. High above as they looked up from its sheltering sides, swallows swooped and soared, making intricate invisible patterns on the sky.

Should he tell her how often he came there, not expecting – scarcely allowing himself to hope that he would find her, but taking pleasure in the place because she liked it; not yet daring to seek her out, knowing that some day he would find her there. Taken by surprise, she would greet him with the look of luminous delight that made her, lovely as she was, more than beautiful. She was so young and unspoiled. He must never impose himself upon her; never go about things in the wrong way. If only he knew, if only he had the faintest idea what the right way was, or when would be the right time to go about it. Even taking her hand, for instance, as he longed to do, might be the wrong thing and spoil this perfect moment.

The more nearly perfect the moment, the shorter-lived. They had startled a rabbit and saw it dart, terror-stricken to its burrow. As its white scut disappeared, Margot's mood changed. A frightened creature running for safety to its secret place.… She looked round.

‘I wonder where Katie is?'

They had called at the farm where roses now clung to the trellised porch and five-year-old Rosie (as she inevitably had become) listened wide-eyed as her mother told them, ‘No, there's not been a soul gone this way except that young lady in the afternoon all by herself' – Linden and Alex were to be seen sauntering up the cart road – ‘and then Mr Miles just before tea.'

They had also called at the Judds, ducking under the lines of washing to ask if she had come home.

‘She'll be back before dark for sure.' Mrs Judd was shaking out pillow-cases. ‘I'll send down to let you know when she does.'

They had left her, forgotten the Judds and been happy, but now, sensitivity strung to the highest pitch by the wonder and strangeness of being in love, Margot felt in the still air a quickening as of other kinds of strangeness, as if from the heart of silence came warning whispers.

‘She shouldn't be alone, not now. I should have stayed with her.' The dark, instead of driving her home might keep her away, hidden in some secret place where no one else could go.

‘Did she ever come here?' Miles didn't remember ever having seen Katie but he was touched by Katie's concern.

‘Oh yes, when we came for bluebells sometimes.'

Come to think of it, Katie had often been with her. There had been a closeness overlooked while it lasted; its strength, like that of elastic, only perceived when released. She turned, aware as she had so often been of Katie at her elbow, so pale and light, so easily ignored that she might have been here, unnoticed, but there was only Miles looking down at her, in his eyes a look of more than shared concern. She could tell him anything, everything, and he would understand.

‘I had such a feeling in Clint Lane.… One of her pinafores was hanging on the line.…' For once there had been no wind and it had hung there, lifeless. ‘And I thought, suppose.…' After all it was too fanciful to put into words the notion that Katie's outward self was so delicate, so tremblingly unsure of a footing on the earth that it might quite easily escape altogether, take flight, rarefy, and become thin as air where swallows flew so high as to be out of sight, then swooped to skim the green hedge. Head tilted, she stared upward, dazzled, half remembering some other time, some other upward flight when the earth fell away and there was nothing but light and air. ‘She loves her pinafore. There was some material left over from my pink dress.…'

‘I believe I saw her.'

‘Here?'

‘No. Down by the ash tree this afternoon. I thought at first it was you.'

‘Then she wasn't far from home. Which way did she go?'

Miles could not say. The pink shape had been there one moment and gone the next. He had stood at the gate for a minute as Linden walked down the field path. Would Linden have seen Katie? Evidently not; she would have said so. All the same when they all met at the field gate, Margot naturally asked her.

‘No.' The reply was instant. Then more forcibly repeated. ‘No. I didn't see anyone. It was pleasant and quiet, such a change for me.' She had gone by way of the farm. ‘I didn't know that I'd be taking the same walk all over again.'

She leaned wearily against the gatepost, seemed out of sorts and complained of the heat. It was clearly time to go home. Margot looked back once to wave to Miles who was watching them from his side of the gate.

Having floated cloud-like for the past hour, she was now downcast. The walk home became a silent trudge. Light was failing when they came to the ridge. The village below lay shrouded in dusk. From every chimney rose a column of smoke. The evening ritual of stoking kitchen fires had begun; the heaping of coal, source of all comfort and daily threat to the men who hewed it.

The Judds' door was open, their yard dully red from firelight within.

‘No.' Mrs Judd went on ironing without looking up. ‘She isn't back. She's nowhere about the farm. When Ewan came back he went straight out to look for her. He didn't get the job and hasn't had a bite to eat.' Then as they turned away she put down the iron and came to the door. ‘She's never been out as late as this before. Not when it gets dark.'

Impossible to sleep. Thinking of Miles did not help. At some time after midnight Margot had reached the state, half waking, when the day's events take on the likeness of dream, feelings and images interfused. Katie was crouching in a dark burrow, or was it a counter in Burdons' shop? Phantom-like she was rising into the air, growing smaller, almost out of sight, then suddenly falling faster and faster and vanishing.

‘Alex, are you awake?'

‘As a matter of fact I am. What's up?'

‘It may be just silly but I've had the most awful idea about where Katie might be. She was in such a state. She would want to hide in a place where she could never be found, ever.'

Alex listened, apparently sceptical. No wonder: it did seem improbable.

‘You've got Katie on the brain. I never heard such rot. For heaven's sake, go back to bed. And mind you don't wake Linden. She was very tired.'

To be told it was all rot was what she had counted on. She had certainly been out of her mind and was so still to some extent. Tiptoeing to bed, she noticed that the door between her room and Linden's had swung open slightly. Linden was not asleep either. There had been just enough light from the uncurtained window to make out her white figure kneeling by the bed. The abnormality of the day had stretched into the night. She who never prayed was saying her prayers.

Why? Margot was too tired to wonder and soon fell asleep. Sounds of movement in the house an hour later did not disturb her. It was not until morning that she learned how Alex and Lance had spent the rest of the night – and what they had found.

CHAPTER VIII

The shop stood empty for a long time after Miss Burdon left. For a time she had hung on, not from stubbornness but because she could not afford to move. After Katie's death the shop bell ceased to ring; in fact, Katie herself was probably the last person to ring it. The knell it tolled was not only for her but for Miss Burdon's means of livelihood. Not another inch of ribbon crossed her counter; not another farthing fell silently into her empty till.

She may never have seen the word ‘Murderer' chalked on the pavement outside her door as she remained indoors, alone and in constant dread of the Judds. Rob's ship docked in time for the funeral; Jo's two younger brothers and Ewan made up a formidable quartert. Toria Link drifted away just before a third volley of bricks shattered the big window. Bella, unwilling to sacrifice the regard of Ewan Judd by staying on, found a job at the Penny Bazaar in Elmdon. It was assumed that Miss Burdon was still at home, invisible behind shutters and drawn curtains until at last the shop was let and she moved away.

Hers was not the only life to be altered by the death of a morsel of humanity insignificant even in a community as small and unremarkable as that of Ashlaw. No one beyond the limits of the village had ever heard of Katie Judd. Many had never heard of Ashlaw, not until they read the headlines in the county press,
TRAGIC DEATH OF WAR ORPHAN: GIRL'S BODY FOUND IN MINE SHAFT
and more colourfully in its columns:
Accused of theft she fled.… Death trap.… Scandalous neglect.… Her life for a string of beads?