By six she was awake again, her body and mind far too alive, too stimulated, for more than those short snatched hours of rest. Taking care not to wake the slumbering Nick, she extracted her lower body from the weight of his legs, her arm from under his head, and slipped out to the kitchen, where twice she filled a mug to the brim with cold water from the tap and drank it down. Already – or still – the breeze from the open kitchen window was shot through with heat. Picking up from the table her book on witchcraft, she walked out naked into the garden, and over to the bench beneath the apple tree. It was odd, she suddenly thought, how even thus alone she would normally have been too self-conscious for this display, yet this morning there was a simple, heedless pleasure in it; how strange, too, that she should feel completely at one with this body, for all the unfamiliarity of her stretched muscles, battered limbs and sensitised, tingling skin.
The editors of Kathy’s book had not, in 1935, done much of a job on the indexing. There were entries for neither Blaxhall nor Parmenter, or else she would surely already have discovered the page towards the end of the book which contained the final reference to the case of Patience Spall, who was arraigned and convicted at the Bury St Edmund’s assizes on the last day of August 1656 and burned in the village of Blaxhall the following morning.
She found it now, and this is what she read.
There seems to have been little local sympathy for Patience, described in one contemporary account as ‘a sallow, skelly-boned maid’, ill-favoured, and as having a face like wormwood. For her victim and his young widow, by contrast, there was widespread compassion, heightened by the tragic circumstance that Daniell Parmenter should have died on the very night of his wedding to Katherine.
It may be that Patience was indeed responsible for the fire, or perhaps the villagers were primed to attest against her, for the prosecution case did not rest solely upon the usual supernatural signs which so many witches were convicted – the milk which curdled at her touch, the noontime flight of a nightjar – but upon the testimony of two separate witnesses who both claimed to have seen her out abroad that night in the proximity of the Parmenters’ barn.
If Patience was truly at the barn; if she saw Daniell go inside; if she did light the flame which set the place alight, and, if so, why – the answers can only be a matter for conjecture. Why would a young girl burn to death a bridegroom on his wedding night? To the modern psychoanalytic mind, some explanations may of course suggest themselves. Had Patience, perhaps, a morbid hatred of the sexual act – some say, as a result of incestuous abuse at the hand of her father? Or might she have had an obsessive sexual fixation on Katherine Parmenter which, frustrated, impelled her to kill the new-wed husband in a jealous rage? Whatever the truth of it, we shall never know, for Patience Spall took the secret with her to her unconsecrated grave.
By now it was nearly seven o’clock, and inside the house, at the French windows, the morning sun slid between the curtains which last night they had never stopped to close. There it warmed the single pair of naked feet which were flung uncovered from beneath the quilt – but the exhausted Nick never stirred. The sun burned strongly for such an early hour, its brilliance unfiltered by the heat haze that would build up later on; it was going to be another blazing day. A minute more, and its rays crept round to fall across the witch bottle, which still lay on its side where Kathy had left it, on the rug beside the base of the chimney breast. Sunlight glinted on the smooth, pellucid glass, palely tinged with green.
In the garden, heavy with outdoor morning scents and the lassitude of the night’s expended energies, Kathy’s mind turned round and round in slow, soporific circles, while the print drifted in and out of focus before her eyes.
...the tragic circumstance that Daniell Parmenter should have died on the very night... the tragic circumstance... the newly-wed husband... the very night of his wedding to Katherine...
There must have been a crack in the bottle: the merest whisker – no doubt the result of Nick’s invading spade – snaking its filigree path through the ancient glass. It was only a hair’s breadth, but sufficient to let in oxygen. The sun seared through the glass and on to the twisted cloth inside which, desiccated by the centuries, was cracking and crisped to tinder, impregnated with its long-dried sulphurous cocktail; it scorched the knot of fabric through the glittering glass, bringing to a simmer the anhydrous witch’s brew. In the cauldron boil and bake. The curve of the bottle’s flank served to focus and intensify the light, concentrating the rays on a single point, a pinprick, deep in the blood-dark folds of cloth.
A soft, plosive pop, inaudible beyond the confines of the bottle, released the first gauzy wisp of smoke and with it a smouldering, acrid odour. Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Then came the flame. Bluish and tentative at first, it began to lap along a ridge of fabric, but quickly grew bolder, darkening to purple and rich red, then leapt, hungry and orange, to lick the inside of the glass. Finally, it found the crack, the way to the outside air and life-giving oxygen – where, invigorated, it bucked and swayed its wild banshee dance, until it met the threads of Persian wool.
Fire burn...
It was the scent which jerked Kathy to wakefulness. It caught unmistakably at her throat – the sour, dry, abrasive rasp of fresh smoke. The book fell and, blindly, barefoot, she was running across the dew-wet grass, running towards the smoke which scrolled from French windows, towards Parmenters, and Nick.
Curlew Call
This is such a brilliant place, Mum. I’m going to love it here, I know I am, even though I’m stuck out on my Larry lonesome with just an old lady for company and everybody thinks I’m crazy. I can actually see the salt marshes from my bedroom window if I lean out a bit and look eastwards towards the estuary. Well, not the mudflats when the tide is out, but the reed beds, anyway – the feathery tops of the reeds. And at high tide you can see the water, too, when the sun’s on it, shining through in little silvery strips. Now I’m lying here in bed sending this before I go to sleep and all I can hear is curlews. Imagine – actually dozing off to the sound of curlews! Night night. Love you.
Sorry about the short and rather incoherent message last night. Honestly though, Mum, I was so knackered by the time I’d got here. Crossing the Underground took for ever with my massive rucksack, up and down all the escalators bashing people and having to apologise, and I missed the train from Liverpool Street that I was supposed to get and that meant a longer wait at Ipswich for the connection to get up here, and it stopped at every bush and cow shed all the way and there wasn’t a buffet car or even one of those trolleys to get a Twix or something. But I had just enough battery left to ring Miss Keble, who says to call her Agnes, and she said not to worry at all, my dear – she always says ‘my dear’ – and the last bus wouldn’t have gone yet and she’d wait the tea. That was how she said it, ‘I’ll wait the tea’, which I think is brilliant, like something out of Miss Marple or Downton Abbey.
She gets about the house like a demon in her wheelchair – the ground floor at least. She’s had all the old wooden steps between the rooms levelled off, even though she says she had to keep quiet about having it done because the house was built in the reign of Henry VIII and she’d have needed listed buildings consent. Her bedroom is downstairs and a shower and loo and this little room that she calls her studio, which actually when I caught a glimpse looks full of books, but then so is the sitting room which she says we’re to share. There’s a telly that looks as if it ought to be in black and white and have newsreaders on it in bow ties who talk like the Queen and say ‘This is London’. So I hope it works OK and gets all the Freeview stuff at least so I can see Autumnwatch, and Agnes doesn’t insist on us sitting down together to the Antiques Roadshow or Songs of Praise or something dreadful. But anyway, she seems nice, and she’s a good cook as well. We had smoked haddock for this tea that she’d ‘waited’, two huge fillets each with parsley sauce plus a poached egg on top and proper bread from a loaf, not the pre-sliced plastic kind. Granary – a
lways my favourite, as you know. And it really was tea in the old-fashioned sense, because she made us a pot of Earl Grey with it, which was a bit weird – I mean, Earl Grey with fish! – but not as bad as you’d think, and better than just tap water. When I find out where the shop is I’m going to lay in some Diet Cokes.
Agnes says I can take the day off today – which feels a bit funny when I’ve only just arrived and not actually done anything yet – but she says she doesn’t paint every day, or at least she doesn’t need to be taken out to paint, because she often brings her canvases back and finishes them off at home in the studio. From memory, she said. And then she said something about getting older and falling back on memories more and more, and I had no idea what to say to that. It was a bit embarrassing. But she didn’t seem to mind, or maybe even not to notice. That’s a nice thing about Agnes, I’ve decided – she doesn’t seem to get embarrassed about stuff at all, or be bothered if you can’t think of the right thing to say. Except that... well, it’s also maybe that she’s a bit distant, as if she’s lost somewhere off inside her own head and not really here with me at all, which could be unnerving if I let it get to me. Probably comes with her living here so long in all this isolation. But she says I should have today to myself, to settle in, or go and explore without her getting in the way. ‘Make your own acquaintance with the marshes’ is how she put it, which I thought was an odd thing to say, as if she thinks they’re alive and she goes out and communes with the mud or something, but it was also rather poetic. And it means a whole glorious day out on the estuary – just me and my binoculars and, hopefully, twenty or thirty species of waders and wildfowl.
Meanwhile I can hear the curlews again, calling out across the reed beds. It seems to be the regular soundtrack of the marshes at this time of the evening, in the hour or two after the sun’s gone down. You wonder what they’re doing out there in the dark, sleepless and crying like that. And if you lie still and listen – really listen – there’s something so pitiful about the sound, it could nearly break your heart, like someone whistling hopelessly over and over for a dog that’s lost.
I saw the avocets! I knew they might be here, and did hope autumn would be a good time to see them. Their nesting grounds are mostly nearer the sea – Havergate Island or the reserve at Minsmere – but they disperse inland up the estuaries post-breeding and before they fly off south, fattening up on the rich pickings in the mud here. There might even be a few overwintering here – I do hope so, because they’re so beautiful.
You know I’ve never been just a twitcher, Mum, one of those anoraks only interested because they’re rare or to tick them off on a list, like train numbers or something. It’s them – themselves, the birds. You look at the pictures of the avocet in the field guides and you think, what is going on with that bonkers beak? I mean, pointing up at the end like that, like they’ve flown into a brick wall. But it all makes sense when you see them in the flesh, actually down on the mudflats doing their thing. They use it to do a sort of sideways sweepy movement, scooping along just below the surface of the water where it’s shallow over the mud, like skimming cream off the top of the milk, or the fat off the roasting tin before you made the gravy, like you used to when you did Sunday dinners for me and Dad. And it’s absolutely the opposite of the curlews with their downwards-pointing bills, who look all solemn like short-sighted maiden aunts, as if they ought to have one of those lorgnette things perched on the top, and they move along really slowly, peering down into the water and looking for just the right place before they dig. Then they do it ever so delicately, like a surgeon doing some tricky operation with a pair of long-nosed forceps. The little sandpipers and dunlins are different again; they have those shorter beaks, straight and sharp like sewing machine needles, and they go along stabbing them in and out as if they’re hemming a pair of curtains, absolutely metronomic, with their tails bobbing up and down at the other end in counterpoint. I could have watched them all day.
In fact, I more or less did, and totally missed lunch, which Agnes said she always has at half past twelve, but she didn’t seem to mind and said it was ‘only cold cuts, my dear’ which seemed to mean some leftovers of what I’m guessing was her Sunday roast. She told me to help myself from the fridge so I made a sandwich with some more of the nice granary and a bit of pickle and she made us a pot of Earl Grey again, which she seems to live off, and sat with me while I ate. And I said – just to make conversation – did she often cook a joint when it was just her? After I’d said it I wondered if it sounded rude, as if I was accusing her of being lonely and a bit sad, but she didn’t take it that way, I don’t think. She just said, ‘Mother always did, every Sunday.’ She didn’t say it wistfully or anything but she did go rather quiet on me, the way she does, so I wittered on about how you didn’t bother much with big dinners these days, since it was just you and me and no brothers or sisters, and she frowned and repeated, ‘No sister?’ but in a vague sort of way as if her mind was still on something else. So then, because we were talking about Sunday roasts I told her about the avocets scooping the fat off the gravy and she frowned for a bit longer, and finally blinked a couple of times and nodded slowly and said she knew exactly what I meant.
Dad Skyped me from work at lunchtime (his lunchtime, I mean – Chicago lunchtime, not ours here) but it was pretty hopeless. He’d get three words out and then it would freeze up and just sit there buffering. Agnes does have broadband, supposedly, but it’s dead slow – even YouTube is a struggle for it and I can’t watch iPlayer at all. So we gave up and Dad emailed instead. Not that he had anything much to say. He was just taking the mickey the way he always does, going on about how quaint he thinks it is, me spending my gap year in the country as a lady’s companion as if I’m in an Edwardian novel. It’s the painting thing, too – Dad reckons carrying Agnes’s easel for her is going to be all E. M. Forster. I think he imagines I’ll have to read aloud to her in the afternoons, and she’s reclining on a rattan chaise longue rather than stuck in a motorised wheelchair. He was on about how she ought to be taking me to the Riviera to stay at the Hotel Splendide and not just out for tea in Aldeburgh, and if some bloke called Maximilian turns up in a fancy sports car I should check he hasn’t been married before. Honestly, he thinks he’s so funny. And anyway, that’s Daphne du Maurier, isn’t it, not Forster? We did it at school.
I told him, though. It’s not the job so much – though it can’t be as bad as au pairing for some pack of screechy, spoilt kids – it’s where I get to be. I can hardly think of anywhere in the whole country that’s got such an amazing mix of wetland habitats all plonked in together along one little stretch of estuary: reed beds, intertidal mudflats, salt marsh, saline lagoons with sandbanks, grazed marshland and floodable water meadows, and even the strip of vegetated shingle out at Orford Ness. In ten minutes’ walk you can be in native woodland, or cultivated pine forest, or open heath, or farmland bounded by ancient hedgerows. It’s like God designed a heaven especially for birdwatchers and dropped me in it. Give me this over Monte Carlo any day.
Dad can joke about what larks I must have here with Agnes, sipping sherry and playing bezique, and I can tell him, that’s not the point, the point is the birds. But actually I am glad to have Agnes here, or someone here – because I’m not sure even heaven’s a place I’d like to be completely on my own in, the way Agnes has been in this creaking old house.
I’ve done my first day’s work, and it wasn’t exactly arduous. It was one of those misty late September mornings, all pale and gleaming, which tells you it’s going to be hottish later on, and Agnes wanted to make an early start. ‘To catch the light,’ she said, as if there wasn’t about twelve hours of the stuff in front of us, but I suppose she meant the angle of the sun or the particular glow at that time of day. Painters always go on about the quality of the light, don’t they? And you could see what she meant, because once the mist lifted there was a sort of crispness to the edges of everything as if it was all newly outlined in fine black ink.
I can see why it might make you want to sketch or paint, if I could manage to draw anything that looked remotely recognisable or you could even tell which way up the picture was meant to be.
Today I’d have painted the dunlins. Once I’d helped Agnes to where she wanted to be on the riverbank and got her all set up with her easel at the right height and comfortable in her chair with the brake on and her blanket tucked in, and unpacked her tubes and palettes from her satchel and her brushes and knives so they were all within reach, I was free to wander off and daydream, provided I stayed within hailing distance in case she needed anything. I had my binoculars but there wasn’t much about except the dunlins, and I didn’t need the bins to spot those. A great flock of them swooped in as the tide started to go out and leave the mud exposed, all freshly pockmarked with air bubbles where the little crustaceans and things were hastily burying themselves, which to the dunlins meant an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast. They’re so funny when they’re in a group like that. They run along together in a pack, more like little brown mice than birds, because they sort of hunch their heads down on their shoulders and when they’re knee-deep in the sludge they’re all foreshortened and you don’t see their long legs. There’ll be a line of them along the edge of the water and they’re all scurrying in the same direction and then for no apparent reason they all turn in unison and go heading off back the way they came, just as if one of them has given a secret signal or it’s choreographed. Or it’s like the sea on the shingle, with the flecky brown lip of a wave coming rolling in one way and then breaking and rolling out again. I sat there on a patch of sedgy grass with my eyes half shut and the sun on my back and watched them until they were just moving patterns and I could have gone to sleep if I hadn’t had prickly stalks of reed sticking in my legs and the damp slowly soaking through my jeans and making my bum wet.
Sandlands Page 20