‘Laura!’ Edna’s horrified scream caused Joseph to jerk round, his quizzical gaze following Edna’s trembling finger as it pointed to the window. It was too late. Laura had slipped away. In the aftermath, when the fire crews had rendered the flames to embers and Edna stood with Joseph surveying the destruction, it came to her with a shock. The woman! The woman who had burned to death in the tack-room was not Laura. And yet it was. Edna had seen that tragic face with her own eyes and had instantly recognised Laura.
But there was something else. Something so strange and disturbing that she hardly dare let herself dwell on it. Certainly, she would never reveal what she imagined she saw. Never! Not to Joseph, not to a single soul. Yet she could not deny it to herself. In the pyre that had swallowed Laura’s life, there had been another. A stunningly beautiful creature, long dark hair and wide black glowing eyes. In that instant before the scene was changed for ever and Laura slid away, she and the apparition merged as one. In the fervent belief that there may have been two souls lost in the inferno, Edna was mortally afraid for her sanity when it was later revealed that Laura and no one else had died there. And yet, Edna knew what she had seen. She knew. It was enough. Some things were beyond the understanding of mere man or woman.
What she witnessed that night was something to remember. And something to forget. That was why she made no mention of it now, to Laura’s friend. He had come to Bedford to take her home, to where she had grown up and they had dreamed together, before he went his way and Laura went hers. Now, it was time for Laura to return. It would be a long and a sad journey. Edna would not add to his grief, and so she assured him, ‘Laura would not have suffered, please believe that.’ When she saw the relief in his face, she hoped the Lord would forgive her.
Later, when Laura’s friend had departed, she went down to the stable yard and stood before the devastation that once was the tack-room. In her mind’s eye she imagined the face at the window… Laura… the black-eyed stranger… not two, but one. She turned away. She would never again willingly call the image to mind. It was too disturbing. Too real. She could never hope to understand.
16
The room was long and narrow, with tall arched windows high up in the wall, four on each side like silent sentries keeping watch. On the east side the morning sun poured in, bathing the room in warm brilliance. There was a hushed atmosphere, and a sense of great joy. There was peace, and there was hope. At the head of the room was a long mahogany table, each end bedecked with beautifully arranged flowers. Behind the table stood two people, a short bald and bespectacled man in a dark blue suit, and by his side a sturdy, somewhat handsome woman with an open book resting lightly in the palms of her hands, her soft invasive voice bringing the service to an end. Closing the book, she smiled and the smile revealed surprising beauty. As she walked away to sit behind a smaller desk to the right, she glanced back and her smile deepened. She had seen it all before, but each newly wedded couple brought their own unique glow with them. She watched fondly as the couple signed their names into the book. Afterwards they thanked her and she wished them well in their new life together. Quietly and with reverence the couple walked from the room into the glorious sunshine of a mid-October day. Outside on the lawn the guests laughed and chatted, spilling the coloured confetti over the heads and shoulders of the happy couple, while the photographer tried desperately to restore order.
‘Oh, Emily, I do love you so.’ Bill clasped her small fingers into his and bent his head to kiss her full on the mouth. The cheer that went up from all about brought a pleasant pink flush to Emily’s face. Undeterred, he kissed her again. The photographs promised to be exceptionally good.
‘God certainly smiled on you today,’ said the photographer, blinking up at the clear blue sky, ‘especially as it’s been raining for a week.’ He packed his gear, loaded it into his car and drove speedily away; he had a busy schedule today. Too busy, he thought. Was he getting too greedy, he asked himself.
‘Are you all right, son?’ Bill’s warm brown eyes looked down on the man in the wheelchair, his heart brimming with love and gratitude.
‘I’m fine. Stop worrying!’ Matt laughed. ‘I’m only sorry to be stuck in this damned chair.’ He so much wanted to stand on his own two feet for this wonderful occasion, but he was not yet strong enough. There was a deep-down tiredness in him – ‘debilitating effects of the drugs’, the doctors had said. The couple on that barge were known addicts and the girl had a history of mental instability. Apparently it was not the first time she had endangered other people’s lives. But Matt could only be thankful that they had dragged him from the river. Two of his spinal discs had been dislocated in the process, and he was still in considerable pain. Attending Bill and Emily’s wedding had been in blatant defiance of doctors’ advice, but his pleading had persuaded them, with the proviso that he report immediately back to the hospital where he should expect to spend at least another two weeks under observation.
‘I don’t want to take you back there, to the hospital.’ The gentle loving voice was one he had feared he might never hear again. When he lifted his gaze to her now, his dark eyes were bright with tears and wonder.
‘I love you, sweetheart,’ he murmured, reaching out his long, strong fingers.
‘I love you too,’ Cathy whispered, holding his hand and nuzzling her face against his thick shock of dark brown hair.
From a distance, Bill and Emily saw their own happiness mirrored in these two young people, and their joy was complete. For Emily this was something precious, this was her family. Her family! ‘The nightmare is over,’ Bill said quietly, though the memories were still alive in his eyes, in his deeper thoughts. Memories too horrendous ever to leave him completely. The terror of knowing that Matt and Cathy were fast slipping away from him, the suffering, the evil that had infiltrated their very souls, even now on his wedding day and with the sun lighting all the corners, he was wary of every dark fleeting shadow. ‘I still can’t understand why Maria kept the truth of your background from you.’
‘I thought about that a lot,’ Emily admitted, ‘and though I don’t know why she kept it from me, I believe she had her reasons. We shall never really know.’ Emily, too, had undergone a devastating ordeal. She had blamed herself for Maria’s lonely and terrifying death. And yet, when the door was broken down and they found Maria there, it was as though she had left this world in a state of peace and grace. The room was filled with unique devastating calm. Maria was lying on the floor, her features lifted by the faintest of smiles, and her two hands clasped together, as though holding something, ‘or like she was praying,’ the nurse had said. There was nothing untoward, no indication of why such heart-rending screams had issued from the room. Only the absence of the doll made Emily wonder.
Later, the full extent of the horror of that night was revealed: the awful carnage that Emily ‘imagined’ she heard from outside Maria’s room – and which the nurse did not! – the inexplicable events in Matt’s hospital room, and the tragic death of Laura. It was incomprehensible that all of these things should happen almost at the same time, and yet they did!
Afterwards, when Bill and Emily talked of these things, it was agreed that somehow the tallow images so innocently brought from Australia were a source of unspeakable evil. Then, when Cathy gradually regained her strength of mind, and Matt also was on the road to recovery, they were obliged to see how Edna had spoken the truth when she claimed ‘all the bad things started when that thing was brought into the house!’ Maria’s own records, and the findings of the private detective, confirmed their suspicions. There were other things too… Maria’s family history so meticulously recorded in the Bible and hidden in the chest which had once belonged to her grandparents, Ralph and Maria Ryan… documented evidence revealing how Ralph Ryan was duty officer when a certain ‘insane and murderous convict’ was taken from the asylum to be hanged; there were even rumours that had filtered through the years in the halls of the prison establishment, as to how the witch h
ad ‘laid a curse on Ralph Ryan’. It was handed down also that this woman was skilled in the art of tallow moulding… a candlemaker ‘like her hanged grandmother before her’.
There was talk that Rebecca Norman’s wickedness sprang from a childhood where she had suffered terrible loneliness after being so callously deserted, first by one parent and then by the other. The child’s unquestionable love for the father who cruelly abandoned her soon turned to a dark and seething hatred. It was said by those who remembered something of the truth that the father created in his child an evil that knew no bounds. And when they spoke of it, they only whispered, and prayed she was not somehow listening, marking their every word.
‘Are you happy, Cathy?’ Matt looked up from his wheelchair, smiling from his heart when her soft grey gaze mingled with his. It seemed a lifetime ago, he mused, when those lovely eyes were stricken with such pain, such dark loathing. Now, they shone with life and love, aglow with vitality and contentment. There had been times when he believed their lives, their love, was over. Now, it was the beginning again. There was so much to share, so very much to look forward to.
‘Oh, Matt… Matt!’ she sighed, but it was a sigh of pleasure. ‘I could never find words to express my happiness.’ They were alone at last. Bill and Emily had left for two weeks’ honeymoon in the Channel Islands, and Edna had tactfully stolen Joseph away indoors, ‘to make a fresh brew o’ tea’, she promised, and the stable grooms had no reason to linger after enjoying the wedding refreshments so beautifully presented by the effervescent Edna. Now there was just Cathy and Matt, and a fleeting sense of sadness as they looked on the blackened corpse that once was the stables. Not for the first time, Matt wondered what could have brought Laura back to the stables so late that night. Had she forgotten something? Did she have a secret rendezvous? No one knew. Perhaps they would never know. ‘Do you want to leave Slater’s Farm?’ Cathy asked now, hoping in her heart that he would not forsake this lovely place in spite of all the bad things.
It seemed an age before he spoke, but even so he did not give her an answer. Instead he continued to gaze on the ruins as he said in a curious voice, ‘All these years, Cathy, and I never knew about Maria… that she was my great-aunt.’
He fell silent, shaking his head in astonishment as he recalled the revelations made by Maria’s own hand, and which Emily had found secreted in the chest. It was all there, how Maria had survived many ‘strange tragedies’ in her family, and so, when her own sister and brother-in-law perished in a bushfire – which the children, a boy and a girl, survived – Maria put the boy into safekeeping in an Australian orphanage. That boy was Matt’s own father, who himself was later killed in a strange accident.
The surviving girl-child was Emily. The girl was injured, though, and left a cripple. Desperate and afraid of the ill-fortune that had so relentlessly stalked Ralph Ryan’s descendants through the years, Maria gave the girl Emily to the homely couple who were employed by Emily’s parents, and who adored the infant. With Maria’s help and financial support, they left Australia for England, where they were to make a new life for themselves and little Emily.
Some fourteen years later, Emily’s adoptive parents met a violent ‘accidental’ death, and Emily was taken into Maria’s care, never knowing that she had been adopted, and unaware that Maria Hinson, the kindly but eccentric woman she came to love, was really her own aunt.
When, after Maria’s death, she perused the contents of the chest and discovered to her astonishment that Maria’s life history was also her own, her joy was mingled with regret. Regret that she and Maria had never openly shared their common heritage, regrets because now she knew that even in her most forlorn and solitary moments, she had never really been alone, without blood-kin. ‘If only I’d known,’ she confided in Bill, ‘my life would have been so much more meaningful.’ But she forgave Maria for that one mistake, after realising that the old lady had her reasons, and remembering fondly all the love and guidance that dear lonely woman had given her over the years.
‘Penny for them,’ Cathy murmured, kneeling on the grass beside him, and looking up to see how preoccupied he was. She saw too the hint of sadness in his dark eyes, eyes that had seen too much suffering, eyes which – like hers – had shed too many tears. Like her, he was still haunted. It was etched into his handsome features, thinner now, and seeming gaunt against the pallor of his skin. All of his pain had been her pain. In the dark confusion of her mind there had been only a shocking desire to hurt, to maim, to kill. Now, thank God, every day that passed was another step out of the darkness, away from the pain, until soon there would remain only the good things. Only the good things.
‘I was just thinking of Maria, and Emily,’ he said softly, ‘my own kin.’ He stroked his fingers against her face and gazed down with the love of a man for his woman. ‘All those wasted years after my parents were killed, and I searched the world for the old aunt my father had spoken of so many times.’ He laughed with a mixture of anger and relief. ‘And all the time she was here, in the home of our ancestors. Oh, and Emily! My father’s own sister. If only he had known. Oh, Cathy, if only he had known.’
‘Shh! Don’t look back, Matt,’ Cathy urged. ‘There is so much to look forward to. You have Emily now. And me. We are all one family, with a family’s ambitions and hopes for the future.’
He nodded. ‘You’re right, sweetheart. And I thank the Good Lord for bringing us together.’ Suddenly his mood darkened. ‘How could I ever live without you?’ He was remembering, and the pain was intense.
Cathy put a finger to his lips. ‘No, Matt. Don’t think of what might have been. Think only that we’re here together, you and me… and that my father and Emily have found each other.’ She paused, looking back towards the cottage. ‘You and I, Matt, we have so much. And I love you.’ She looked at him now and he saw that she was crying.
He gazed on her a moment longer before clasping her in his arms. ‘You are everything to me,’ he murmured, his face lighting up as he declared, ‘and we won’t leave Slater’s Farm! We’ll stay and build our lives here, just as we planned.’
‘And it will be wonderful,’ she answered, snuggling into him, ‘just as we planned.’
It was cold. The sky was grey and moody, heavy with the threat of snow. In a small hamlet some fifty miles from Liverpool, James trudged a path through the churchyard, a solitary figure, destined for ever to be lonely. Shivering in the bitter November day, he pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck, hurrying his determined footsteps towards the ancient cedar tree and the grave which nestled in the ground beneath its branches. He knew the path well; he could have walked it blindfolded. Every day for the past four weeks he had trodden the same path. It was his love for a certain woman that kept bringing him back. And memories. And a deep burning regret.
After reverently laying the flowers beneath the tall marble headstone, he stood awhile, thinking of how things might have been, seeing Laura in his mind’s eye, her auburn hair flowing in the summer’s breeze the way it did on that day so long ago, when they walked across the meadow. A day so beautiful, yet so tragic, a day that was etched on his mind for all time. The day that he told Laura he was going away, that he had fallen in love with someone else. It was a mistake. What he felt for the other woman soon proved to be only a shallow infatuation. Over the years he had tried so desperately to make amends, but though she still loved him, Laura would not, could not, forgive him. And in all truth he did not blame her for that. What he had done was foolhardy and cruel. He had inflicted unnecessary suffering on a good and wonderful woman, who for all of her life had already survived so much tragedy.
‘You do keep her grave nice.’ The voice startled him from his painful reverie. The vicar was old, wrapped up against the chill wind. Peeping from beneath the lapels of his dark overcoat could be seen the white collar of his station. He came closer, looking down to where Laura was laid to rest. ‘I remember her as a child,’ he said, smiling with that confident dreamy essence
of a man of God. He pointed to a neat row of grey granite headstones near by. ‘Her parents too… and all their children. I knew every one.’ An icy gust of wind buffeted him; he thrust his hands into his pockets and crouched over, taking the full force on his back. ‘Laura’s parents… two sisters and a brother.’ He shook his head, saying sadly, ‘All here in this churchyard. All taken too soon.’ He sighed, straightening as best he could, but his old bones were too bent. ‘All victims of a cruel fate,’ he went on. ‘Tragic. So tragic.’
James glanced meaningfully to a dark corner against the high wall. ‘There are four generations buried here, I do believe that Laura was the last of the line.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Strange, though, the violent manner in which they all died. None of them old… except of course the great-great-grandfather. He lived the longest, to a ripe old age. All the same, it must have been the cruellest suffering of all, to see your family leave you one by one in such a way. One wonders what that wretched man did to deserve such a fate. It is a strange thing,’ murmured the thin-faced man, ‘almost like a curse. You’re a man of God. Do you believe in such things?’
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