Sandlands

by Rosy Thornton

  The day had been dazingly hot. The heat, which in the early morning had shimmered with soft humidity, building slowly, layer by washed watercolour layer, by mid-afternoon was fat and thickly textured, laid on with a knife like oils. Even now, at past six o’clock, it still crouched heavy in the shade of the cedar trees and shimmered over the lawn. Nick’s neck and forearms were sheened with sweat.

  ‘Afraid I’m out of beer. But there’s juice or Coke in the fridge, if you fancy it?’

  ‘I’d rather have a proper drink. Raymond at the Ship makes Victor Meldrew look sunny, but he keeps a good ale.’

  So they’d adjourned to the terrace in front of the pub, and he was on to his second pint while she tried to remember to take slow sips at her cold white wine. Inside the bar a man in a leather cap was playing the melodeon while an elderly woman, with greater confidence than musicality, sang a song about a wounded knight’s quest.

  ‘I’ve been reading up about the Suffolk witch trials,’ Kathy found herself telling Nick. ‘It was quite a bloodbath. Eighteen of them hanged in one day at Bury St Edmund’s in the 1640s.’

  The history class nerd. But Nick was a receptive audience and his blue-grey eyes didn’t stray from her face. She took another gulp of wine, which was slightly tingly on her tongue and tasted of summer twilights.

  ‘It was that man they called the Witchfinder General – Matthew Hopkins. He was based down south near the Essex border but his family had land at Framlingham, so this whole area was his stamping ground.’ And stamping is what he did – along with burning and slashing and crushing beneath his heel. ‘They came from all round here, his victims. Halesworth and Yoxford and Brandeston.’

  ‘But not Blaxhall?’

  ‘Not that day, at that particular trial. But another time, who knows? They claim this Hopkins was responsible for putting to death three hundred women.’

  A low whistle. ‘Bloody hell. Makes Jack the Ripper look a very dull boy.’

  ‘And that was just him – just that one man. But there were others, lots of them, sniffing out imagined witchery at every parish pump.’

  ‘And clear was the paley moon,’ came words of the old woman’s song through the open door from the bar, ‘when the shadow passed him by...’

  ‘But what about the buried bottle?’ Nick seemed really to want to know; at least, he was leaning forward across the table and his loosely laced fingers where they clasped the beer glass were almost touching her wrist. ‘Doesn’t it mean our witch can’t have been burned or hanged or whatever they did to them? If there was a bottle, doesn’t it mean she was still around to be her chucking about her spells and hexes?’

  It seemed to matter to him, and, oddly, to her as well. Our witch.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. The book said they think the bottles were usually intended as a counter-charm against the black magic of a living witch. But maybe not always. Maybe... well, the thing is, once or twice a bottle has been found which appears to contain entrails.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ He looked genuinely aghast and a shudder ran between them like chilly electricity.

  ‘I know – horrible.’ Their witch, already dead; their bottle, a fetish to ward off sorcery from beyond the grave.

  Another beer and another glass of wine, and Nick was prepared to volunteer the information that he’d been doing some witchcraft research of his own. ‘Just online, you know.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘About how they spotted them, these women who were supposed to be witches. For a start, they all had their familiars. A familiar was the witch’s evil spirit, which she sent out to do her wicked work for her, but they took the form of animals or birds. It could be almost anything – a fox, a jackdaw, a starling, a toad. If there was an owl nesting in your barn, say, then you were in big trouble.’

  In big trouble... This glass seemed to be even tinglier than the last one; things were beginning to buzz and spin. The singer’s toneless voice hung at the edges of perception: ‘...below the hill were the brightest stars, when he heard the owlet cry...’ Kathy attempted to focus. ‘Or if you were a bit too fond of your cat, perhaps?’

  He grinned. ‘Right. And then there was always supposed to be some kind of mark, somewhere on the witch’s body. Beelzebub’s sign and all that. It could be a birthmark, like you said before. But often it was just a wart, or even a mole. Just an ordinary discreet sort of mole, a cute sort of mole, the kind that anyone might have...’ His eyes slipped down towards the open neck of her shirt, and the upper slope of her left breast.

  Aware of the heat in her face, she clutched her wine glass tight against her chest. Her head felt unanchored, weightless.

  ‘And then they’d claim it was a third nipple – Satan’s nubbin, the devil’s dug.’ The blue-grey eyes were dark and dangerous. ‘The place where the sorceress would suckle her familiar.’

  ‘...wherefore came you here? I seek the witch...’

  By an effort of will, Kathy forced herself to break his gaze and lightness into her voice. ‘So, what kind of websites were these that you’ve been looking at, exactly?’

  At that he laughed and the spell, for the moment, was interrupted.

  ‘Another glass of wine?’

  I burn. At night it is that I burn the worst, lying alone in my maiden bed where I no longer know the peace of a maiden conscience. My linen constricts me, with its brazen coils which twist and cling close about my limbs. Each evening I slip out from its sleepless embrace and creep from the house while all are abed. As if by the tugging hands of demons am I drawn to the place, to Parmenters, to stand and gaze upon its walls. Its pink walls: such a pretty hue, but I did hear the maddened squeals of the pig when its throat was slit and bled into the limewash for the renderwork. I gaze upon the house wherein he lies, he for whom in sin I burn, and I picture him there. May God forgive me, I picture him lying naked there, there in the house whose very walls are soaked in blood and ruddied with the stain of death.

  The name – Parmenters – was unusual, of course, but she had grown accustomed to it and ceased to give it thought. If she’d had any notion of the reason for it, it was of some kind of medieval craft, like pargeting or parquetry. Or she associated it with Parliament men, thinking perhaps this had been a Puritan house – which brought her back to zealotry, and witchfinding.

  It was only when, after two months since her move here of telling herself she must, she finally took a visit to the church one Sunday that she realised how literal the name of her house must be. There were several stones of Parmenters – Victorian Emilys and Regency Janes – growing grey and gold with lichen among the drooping heads of cow parsley. And in the floor of the aisle, worn almost to smoothness by more than three centuries of devoted feet, was an older memorial, carved in pinkish sandstone. It was this one in particular which arrested her attention, because of its age and the woman’s name – her own name.

  Here lyes the Body of Daniell Parmenter, Dec’d 19th May 1656 aged 24 years. Also Katherine his wife, Dec’d 5th Octob’r 1685 aged 51 years.

  Such a long widowhood, thought Kathy, to outlive her husband by almost thirty years.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s sad?’ she asked Nick in the half-lit heat of the pub bar. ‘All those long, lonely days on her own in the house.’

  ‘And lonely nights,’ he said softly. ‘Without a man to warm her bed.’

  She sat up late that evening on the rug before the inglenook. September was only two weeks away but it was far too hot still even to contemplate laying a fire, so she found some church candles, fat and buttery white, and lit them around the grate. The Ship’s Pinot Grigio still warmed her blood and cast a glow to merge with the candlelight, and she thought about chimney places and how they were the conduit of spirits. But the shadows that danced around the flickering light were friendly ghosts; dark demons seemed far away tonight from the encircling safety of hearth and home. She gazed into the candles’ fire as people had gazed before her in this very spot for half a thousand years – her predecess
ors, the chatelaines of Parmenters. She thought of Katherine Parmenter and her thirty years in widow’s weeds; she thought of all those who had sat where she now sat and conjured pictures in the flames, hugged close their memories or dreamed their future dreams. She thought of all who had lain where she now lay – had lain alone or lain with another. And, as sleep crept in to fade the light, she thought of Nick.

  They say I am too base for him. They say that Spalls are low of birth, of simple Saxon stock – tillers of other men’s soil, bondsmen and rentlings, quarter-day slaves – while Parmenters are fine and fancy folk, born of Norman seigneurs and overlords, that noble blood runs in their veins. But cannot a mouse raise its eyes from the ground and gaze upon a cat, a pauper look at a prince? I only look at him, at Daniell Parmenter in his house with walls of blood. I only look – and burn.

  Another book arrived, an old one from the 1930s not currently in print, which she’d had on order from the library in Ipswich and picked up after work. From it she learned of the ingenuity of witches, of the monstrous range of mischiefs attributed to their hand. Stillbirths and miscarriages; childhood agues; droughts and floods and thunderstorms; fits in hogs, milk fever in cows; fruit that withered and crops that failed to thrive; drownings, poisonings, and even fires.

  And that was when she found her: the witch in the bottle, her own Parmenters witch. In the settlement of Blaxhall in Suffolk, the author wrote, another death by fire was laid at the door of a sorceress, a village girl of fifteen summers by the name of Patience Spall. The victim was Daniell Parmenter, a yeoman farmer. According to one local account, Daniell was awakened at night by the whinnying of his plough horse and went out to the barn to attend to the animal, thinking it perhaps to be sick of the colic from a surfeit of spring grass. When he did not return to bed, his wife looked out, saw the barn ablaze and raised the alarm. Too late: her husband’s body was found next morning in the embers.

  ‘An arsonist?’ Nick demanded. ‘A pyromaniac? Our witch?’

  ‘Well, all we know, I suppose, is that there was a fire and Daniell died.’ If even that was certain, so long ago and on mere hearsay evidence.

  ‘And she was the one who lit it? No doubt by sending out her familiar with a box of Swan Vestas. Of course she was – because she had a limp, or one shoulder higher than the other, or freckles in the shape of the devil’s horns.’ He sounded scandalised, but his voice was also strangely edged with glee. ‘No question of his just going out there with a torch or a taper and putting it down for a minute to look at his horse, a bit too near some dry straw. Oh, no – it had to be black magic. It had to be our witch.’

  But Kathy only frowned, and crossed her arms around her body to close out the chill that stippled her skin in spite of the breathless evening heat. Slips of yew, sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse... finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-deliver’d by a drab. And they had burned her here for her sorcery, right here in the village, above the church on Silly Hill – which the book explained meant holy hill, a name surely most inapt to this ungodly purpose.

  ‘Her name was Patience,’ was all she said, ‘and she was just a child.’

  I hate her, Kat Alward – Kat Parmenter that is to be. She it is, not I, who shall share his bed. ’Tis bitter bile to think of it, and yet, for shame, the devil does inflame and heat me with imagining of their wanton marriage bed. And Kat’s flesh shall exult to his touch and she shall grow ripe of him, while I in my narrow bed shall shrivel and dry, an empty husk, untended and unfilled. And like the discarded chaff, the dry-parched straw, I am tinder to the spark and hungry for burning. And the flame that consumes me is the flame of hate for her: for she that shortly will become my Daniell’s bride.

  The sound that distracted Kathy from her book of witches came from inside the inglenook. A soft scuffling or scrabbling, its source appeared to be somewhere behind the shoulder of Tudor brick which angled back above the mantel. At her approach the sound ceased, and the air hung dense with silence for a full five, six, seven seconds, counted out methodically by the old brass clock which stood on the mantelshelf; then with a flurry it began again, the scratching and scraping, and now more insistent than before. Ducking beneath the lintel, Kathy found her vision doused by the darkness as effectively as by bucket of hot, black liquid. The heat and the smell of wood-ash choked her nostrils, along with something else, something more visceral, a tang more animal than mineral. She had only a moment in which to try to pinpoint it, to orientate herself and adjust her eyes, before the maelstrom was unleashed and the narrow space about her head was filled with the frantic whirling and beating of all hell’s furies. Her hands sprang up to cover her face but her scream was silent; she dared not open her mouth for fear of letting in the demons. Against her hands and ears and neck and in her hair she felt the assault of a thousand tiny hands, a nameless, formless terror of fur or feather, of stabbing beak and clutching claw.

  To burn in desire or to burn in hate – how lies it with us to tell between the two? A fire once well ablaze makes no nice distinctions – the flame devours all that come in its reach without regard for rich nor poor, for sin nor purity, good nor evil, the bride in Christ nor Satan’s whore. In the heat of passion, hate is love and love flares high and is scorched to hate. I hate them both – Kat Alward and Daniell Parmenter, my beloved, both, in their bed of consuming lust.

  On the Saturday of the August Bank Holiday weekend, Kathy invited Nick over for supper in her garden at Parmenters. His work on the house was complete, the floors and roof damp-proof and watertight, and the rendering renewed to a spanking fresh – and one hundred per cent vegetarian – Suffolk pink. The roses on the garden wall drenched the air in their sweet-shop perfume, as thick as Turkish delight, and the lawn hummed torpidly with insects and the musk of fallen fruit. Scalding late-summer sun looked set to hold for a few days yet, but storms were forecast for the following week. It might be the last chance for a proper outdoor summer feast, and she wanted to share it with Nick. Besides, she had another discovery to show him.

  ‘It’s indoors, in the inglenook.’

  ‘Again? Not another genie in a bottle?’

  ‘No.’ No bottle this time – these were different ghosts.

  ‘What were you doing in the fireplace, anyway? It’s hardly the weather for laying fires.’

  She pulled a face. ‘Scraping up crap.’ Her clawing hell-fiend had turned out to been nothing less ordinary than a starling that come down the chimney and been trapped. She had managed to drive it from the fireplace and out through the open French windows, but it had left behind a mess of droppings and snapped feathers.

  ‘No wonder. Scared shitless I expect, poor thing.’

  ‘It wasn’t the only one. I felt like Tippi Hedren on set with Hitchcock.’

  It was a joke now, but still brought a residual clench to her stomach: the confined space, the blind beating panic. Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing.

  ‘I really must fit you that spark guard,’ said Nick.

  ‘Anyway, come and see what I found when I was cleaning up. I want to show you.’

  It was with some reluctance that they left the fragrant garden, but it was dark now and they had finished the Roquefort and the raspberries; they brought the remains of the Prosecco with them. Inside the house it felt sultry after the freshness of the outdoor night. They’d carried bottle and glasses through to the sitting room; Kathy drew deeply on hers and Nick refilled it.

  ‘Here. Come and see.’ She stepped inside the inglenook, lowering her head to duck under the mantelpiece. On the other side, there was height enough for them both to stand upright between the lintel and the smoke hood which hung behind. The space, as before – though mercifully empty now of birds – was dark as soot and heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. Kathy had a torch.

  ‘There are two wooden beams, you see – two lintels. One behind the other.’ She shone the beam as she spoke. ‘It looks as if the back one is older.’

  ‘Yes. I remember – I noticed when I was work
ing on the floor. It looks as if they put the front one in later to strengthen the chimney breast. Nineteenth century, by the look of it.’

  ‘Right. But look what I found on the old mantel beam. Here, in the gap.’

  She pointed the torch into a cavity a few centimetres wide between the back of the Victorian lintel and the front of its Tudor predecessor, which would once have faced into the room above the fire. He had to lean his face very close to hers to see inside the narrow opening.

  ‘It’s a pair of carved initials, you see.’ She moved her hand inside and outlined the ridged contours of the two swirling shapes. K and D.

  ‘It’s them, don’t you think? It has to be them. Katherine and Daniell.’

  He nodded, and above her torch beam, uplit, she watched his lower lip curve into a smile. ‘It’s them,’ he agreed. ‘And it’s also us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘K is you. Katherine, Kathy. And D is me.’

  ‘Nick? Aren’t you Nicholas, then?’

  A shake of the head. ‘I’m Dominic.’

  In the soft chiaroscuro of the inglenook, in the warm secret space between the two lintels, his hand joined hers in tracing the carved wooden lettering. ‘It’s the two of us,’ he said, ‘entwined.’

  The final word hung between them, thick and smoky and charged. The heat and proximity were suddenly a heady potion; the torchlight trembled with her fingers. Her face was already tilting up to join him as his lips came down and found hers. The torch fell. They were in darkness, and there was only his mouth, still sharp with the fizz of raspberries, and the scent of his skin in her nostrils, hot and human and alive against the smothering staleness of old ashes.

  The lovers spent the night on the old Persian rug in front of the fireplace. At some point, in between spells of touching and talking and laughing and loving, and another bottle of Prosecco, Kathy had fetched down the duvet from her bed upstairs; it was almost four before they finally fell asleep, half on and half under it, their spent limbs still slackly intertwined.