The Coffin Path_'The perfect ghost story'
Page 35
So that is why he was so desperate to see the words written in faded brown ink on that cursed piece of parchment. I search for kindness in my scoured-out heart.
I lean in close and whisper, stomach knotting as I say it: ‘You are the son of Bartram Booth. You are my brother . . . and your name is Matthew.’
The furrows melt from his brow. ‘Matthew,’ he breathes. ‘Matthew Booth . . .’
Then he closes his eyes.
He does not wake again.
It is near dawn when I rise.
I held him until the warmth began to leave his body, his skin started to turn grey and his blood hardened on my breeches. Then I laid him out – Ellis, Matthew, I’m no longer sure what to call him – and rested my head upon his chest. Only one day has passed since I lay just so, his arms about me, soothed by his heat, his scent and the steady beat of his heart, seeking false hope in the dream of a new future.
Now I pick up the golden key and slip the cord about my neck, where it hangs, cold against my chest. I do not want to leave him for a moment but there is something I must do.
I go to my father’s bedchamber. Standing by the bed, I take the leather pouch from my belt, choose a single golden coin and slip it onto his tongue.
I say goodbye.
Then I return to the hall, where poor Agnes lies in a frozen pool of blood. I cannot bring myself to disturb her, but I crouch and slip a second coin into her mouth.
As I do this, I sense that I am watched. It is here. It is waiting for me.
But I do not pray. There is no need. I am not afraid any more.
Back in the old bedchamber, I slip the third and final coin onto my brother’s tongue.
The Devil take them all . . .
I go to the casement. The sky has that dull, heavy look of more snow to come. I open the window, feel the midwinter chill, the ever-present wind, and breathe it in. Drink deep. The air is knife-sharp, slicing my throat. I push the casement wide. The breeze whips hair across my face. I lean out, craving more, filling my lungs until they hurt – the wind that carries the soul of the moor.
The moor.
When my father chose this place, he sought proximity to God. He longed for redemption. He hoped for forgiveness. He came to forget his sins, but the moor would not let him. He tried to teach me to find Paradise among the moss-cushioned rocks and rust-hued becks, in scar and fell and cloud-scattered sky. But as we are closer to Heaven so we are closer to Hell.
The moor is a wild and lonely place, a refuge for the broken and the tainted, a Bethel for the damned. The Devil hides in peat bogs and speaks in the tongue of curlew and nightjar. I see witch-brew in the storm clouds and hellfire in the sunsets. It is a place for those who have fallen from grace. And now I am one of them, I am become part of it.
I am the moor-top wind; the setting sun and the rising moon; the red kite, soaring with talons primed; the rushing becks and the hard, unforgiving crags. I am the ancient stones of Scarcross Hall, the black peat bog, the pulse, the lifeblood.
I can see the tracks that Sam left in the snow, not yet covered, leading through the gates, towards the coffin path, where they disappear, lost in the drifts. Perhaps he will reach home. Perhaps not.
What will they find, when the snows thaw? Will they carry me down the coffin path in a makeshift box? Will they lay me down by night, in that corner of the churchyard, beneath the horse-chestnut, where the ungodly are left to be forgotten? Or will they vilify me? Will they brand me a heretic, a witch, a sorceress, and bury me at the crossroads with a stake run through my heart so I cannot come back and haunt the moor? Will drunks in the tavern scare strangers with tales of the mistress of Scarcross Hall?
I place a hand on the windowpane and look out across the snow-bound hills.
I become aware of a presence at my shoulder.
But I do not turn. There is no need.
I no longer have anything to fear. Nothing can hurt me now. I’ve found the freedom I sought. I understand my fate and it is what I’ve always craved.
It comes closer, grave-cold breath wreathing about my neck, creeping down my spine to my centre. I welcome it: there is pleasure in it.
A hand, pale and gossamer as moorland mist, covers mine. Fingers interlace.
My heart is shattered glass, a key turned in a lock, a skylark.
I will stay where I belong. I will never leave.
Scarcross Hall is mine.
Author’s Note
The Coffin Path is a work of fiction and all characters are of my own invention. However, the story of the Booth family is rooted in a real event that took place during the English Civil War: the storming of Bolton.
In May 1644, Bolton was a staunchly Puritan town of parliament supporters, known as ‘the Geneva of the North’. Charles I’s commander, Prince Rupert, hoped to take Bolton for the king as he led his troops through Lancashire on the way to relieve the siege of York, then a royalist stronghold.
Rupert’s army arrived at Bolton on 28th May and attacked immediately. This initial onslaught was repelled, albeit with about 300 royalist casualties. Rupert’s forces then became enraged when the townspeople hanged a captured royalist soldier who was believed to be an Irish Catholic. Bolton would pay the price – in blood.
Fuelled by sectarian anger, a second attack led by the Earl of Derby successfully breached the walls and carried the fighting into the streets. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Parliamentarian propaganda and ‘eyewitness accounts’ framed the incident as a massacre, with wild, bloodthirsty troops committing the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of innocent men, women and children. Here is a taste:
At their entrance, before, behinde, to the right, and left, nothing heard, but kill dead, kill dead was the word, in the Town killing all before them without any respect, without the Town by their horsemen, pursuing the poore amazed people, killing, stripping, and spoiling all they could meet with, nothing regarding the dolefull cries of women or children, but some they slashed as they were calling for quarter, others when they had given quarter, many hailed out of their houses to have their brains dasht out in the streets, those that were not dead in the streets already, pistoled slashed, brained, or troden under their horses feet . . . The massacring, dismembring, cutting of dying or dead bodies, and boasting, with all new coined oathes, swearing how many Roundheads this sword, or they had killed that day, some eight, some six, some more or lesse; armes, legs, yea the braines themselves lying distant from their heads, bodies, and other parts.
An Exact Relation of the Bloody and Barbarous Massacre at Bolton in the Moors in Lancashire, R.W., 1644
Royalist apologists argue that local burial records do not back up this story and that the majority killed or captured must have been soldiers. The numbers dead, reported by both armies, range from 200 to 2000; we can be reasonably sure that at least 1000 lost their lives, making the incident one of the worst atrocities of the war. Already famed as a man of small mercy, Bolton served to cement Rupert’s reputation as a brutal, ruthless leader.
In a rather satisfying postscript, the Earl of Derby was captured in 1651, tried for treason and eventually executed in Bolton, the very town that surely most enjoyed his fate.
A precursor to the famous battle of Marston Moor, the Bolton massacre is a mere footnote in a larger conflict, but one that exposes the full horror and long-term consequences of the English Civil War for ordinary people. This novel is, in part, written in remembrance of ‘All those of Botonn slayne on the 28 of May, 1644’ (Bolton Parish Register).
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