Rose Cottage

by Mary Stewart

  But what had so disturbed me about it was the fact that she had not enjoyed telling me. Had been, if not frightened, then deeply uneasy. So could there be some sort of ‘message’ here for me? Some sort of ghostly getting-in-touch, like those prophecies of hers that the village still remembered with respect?

  Which was nonsense, I told myself. And maybe I had missed a chance to solve my own mystery. With Miss Linsey in soothsaying mood, I should have asked her where Gran’s treasures had vanished to …

  On which robust note I turned over and went to sleep, and woke to the sound of the milk cart and the creak of the garden gate.

  I flung back the bedclothes and ran to the open casement.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Blaney! I’m sorry, I slept in. Just a pint, please, and I wonder if you’d be good enough to leave that envelope at the vicarage? The vicar’s expecting it.’

  ‘That’s all right. No bother at all. Lovely day, isn’t it? You staying on till the weekend? Well, don’t you trouble yourself, you just get your sleep, and I’ll leave you one tomorrow, and it’ll be two on Saturday. We don’t do a round on a Sunday.’

  I noticed the ‘we’. Sunday wouldn’t be his day off, farmers didn’t have them. It was Rosy’s. I had forgotten that. I smiled. ‘Yes, thank you. It looks as if I’m to be here at least till Monday. And that’s Rosy’s biscuit under the envelope.’

  He took it, pocketed the envelope, waved the empty bottle in salute, and went off.

  Somehow his simple kindness made the worries of the night seem trivial. Cheered and soothed, I dressed and had breakfast and then, after finishing the morning’s chores, went out to gather flowers for Granddad’s grave. That I chose to visit the cemetery this morning was, I told myself, nothing to do with Miss Linsey’s story. I had intended to go one day while I was here, to take flowers on Gran’s behalf and for myself, and to check, as she had asked me to, that the sexton was earning the small fee he got for keeping the grave-plot tidy.

  That was all. Nothing to do with ghosts, or a witch’s dreams.

  I didn’t bother to find an excuse for what I did after I had gathered the flowers and packed them carefully with some damp moss into a basket. The cemetery lay at the south end of the village, and the shortest way would of course have been by the lane. The other route was by the lonnen, which reached the main road a good quarter of a mile beyond the cemetery wall.

  I went by the lonnen.

  There was a stronger breeze today, and the birds were still busy with their morning songs. Deep in the lane the air was still, full of the scents of fern and dead leaves and wild garlic and the musk of Herb Robert trodden underfoot. High overhead the treetops rustled and soughed, but where I walked it was like being at the bottom of a deep, still stream. The only movement was the sudden whisk of russet-brown as a squirrel scudded up a tree trunk, and the flight of a blackbird cutting low across the path with a beakful of food for its young.

  The remains of the caravan were still there, some little way above the gap where I had entered the lonnen on my way from the station. Elder and brambles were growing round and into it, and everywhere there were nettles, those jackal plants that follow humans and take over their deserted homes.

  One wheel lay flat, barely visible in long grass. The other was still held, at a crazy slant, by a rusted bolt. The wood of both was almost rotted away, held only by the decaying iron rims. The van itself was a rotten shell, its roof fallen in and its sides sagging. The shafts, the whole front rig, had come adrift and was in pieces on the ground.

  It was a long-forgotten wreck which could not possibly have anything to tell me. Nevertheless I set my basket down and prodded about among the crumbling wood and the undergrowth, picking up a few nettle-stings and a scratch or two from the brambles, but no message from the past. Nothing left by the ghosts of Miss Linsey’s vision. Just a host of memories, my own ghosts, remembered with amusement and a kind of sadness, the ghosts of the children who had played in this lane, and for whom this derelict gipsy van had been at once romantic and terrifying, and a goal of challenge and delight.

  A sound brought me round, my heart suddenly thudding, as if the place had not wholly lost its terror. A sound which in any other place would hardly even have made me turn my head. A breaking twig, and the slither of a footstep on the bank above me.

  The sun, blazing through a gap at the top of the bank, was blinding me. Against it, at the head of the bank, stood a man, gigantic against the distorting brilliance, body bent forward to stare down at me. He grabbed a branch, swung himself through the gap, and came down the bank at a run, and it was only Davey Pascoe, in his working overalls, and not looking in the least like the menacing gipsy giant that my nerves had conjured up. In fact, so wrapped had I been in my memories that it came as a kind of shock to see him there, a young man with the same thatch of light brown hair and the same grey eyes as the child whose ghost, a moment before, had been playing there.

  I let my breath out. ‘Damn you, Davey! You frightened me!’

  ‘Did I? Well, you disappointed me. I heard something moving about down here, and I thought it might be a badger. There’s a sett further up, and they do sometimes come out in daylight.’

  ‘Really. Well, I’m sorry. But what were you doing here anyway?’

  ‘I’ve been at Swords. The job’s finished, so I thought I’d come back this way and see how you were getting on. I’m not working this afternoon, and I thought you might be starting to sort the stuff out for packing.’

  ‘Well, thanks, but I haven’t done much yet.’ I indicated the basket of flowers. ‘I was going to the cemetery with those.’

  ‘Why this way? It’s quicker by the lane.’ He grinned, and it was the grin I remembered. ‘Or did someone dare you?’

  ‘Who’d do that? I never took the dare anyway. No, I came because I wanted to see—’ I stopped. I was not sure myself just what I had wanted to see.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘I don’t know. It sounds silly. The van, I suppose. I’ve wondered, sometimes, if there’s any way you could tell where it was made or who owned it. You know, like a number plate on a car.’

  ‘After all this time? Even if there was, it’s gone long since.’ He was frowning now. ‘Look, Kathy, it’s past history. You’ll do yourself no good by trying to rake it all up again now. Can’t you let yourself see that it’s past?’ He finished it deliberately. ‘Past and dead and gone.’

  The three syllables fell like stones. I turned and picked up the basket.

  ‘Yes. I know. I’ve accepted that long ago. I’ve had to. Don’t worry about me, Davey. I don’t want to rake anything up that’s better left alone. But we’ve got this mystery on our hands, Gran’s things being stolen, and I thought – well, something happened last night that set me wondering, and I came along here to check it out.’

  ‘Last night?’ he said sharply. ‘What happened? Has anyone been bothering you at the cottage?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing like that. It was Miss Linsey. She came to see me, and told me some very queer things.’

  He laughed. ‘Old Linsey-woolsey? I’ll bet. Such as?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a long story, and it’ll sound queerer still in daylight.’

  ‘Well, queer or not, I’ll listen. Here, give me that basket. I’ll go back with you, and you can tell me about it.’

  His bicycle was at the head of the bank, propped against a stump. He slung the basket over the handle bars and, as we walked up through the field towards the road, with Davey wheeling the bicycle, I told him about Miss Linsey’s visit.

  His reaction was, I suppose, predictable.

  ‘Silly old bat, saying she didn’t want to scare you, and then doing her best to give you nightmares! Well, you can forget all that about your mum running up the lonnen. I could’ve said all that to you myself, there’s no one in the village that hadn’t heard all about her taking off like that, and, I might say,’ he added, ‘there’s no one who blames her, running away from that old catamaran – well, speak
no ill, and there’s two sides to everything. But this tale of old Linsey-woolsey’s about the couple at the graveside – that might be interesting, seeing what else has happened. I mean, there’s been someone at the cottage, that’s for sure, and it might just be that – Oh, well, leave it for now. Here we are, and we can go in by the side gate. Your Granda’s near it, you’ll remember, a little way along.’

  There was a door set into the high brick wall of the cemetery. Davey leaned the bicycle there, retrieved my basket for me, and pushed open the door.

  15

  The cemetery was large – two fields taken over from Low Beck Farm when the old churchyard became too crowded to be serviceable – and surrounded by a high wall. My grandfather’s grave was about midway along on the west side, a large plot, to leave space, as I remembered Gran saying, for late-comers. Among the flowers I had brought for him were clusters of his favourite rose, the cottage rose, Old Blush, which he had planted in every available space at home, because, he said, they wouldn’t let him grow ‘the real roses’ at the Hall, just ‘those coloured cabbages they breed nowadays, all size and no scent’.

  ‘You’ll want water for those,’ said Davey. ‘The tap’s over near the main gate, and there’s usually a can there. I’ll get it for you.’ He went off, leaving me to go to the graveside alone.

  I had stooped to set my basket down at the kerbside before I realised that, when I had gathered the flowers that morning, I had not even thought about taking any for Aunt Betsy. Admittedly, she had never expressed a preference for, or even an opinion of, any flower or plant, except to complain about the scent of the wild garlic in the lane, but even so—

  I need not have troubled. On the grave-space next to my grandfather’s there were already flowers, masses of them, arranged with some care in a couple of metal urns. Not roses, but a mixture of garden and wild flowers, lupins and delphiniums and Canterbury bells, along with dog-daisies and cornflowers, and trails of ivy and wild honeysuckle. The wild flowers were all dead or dying, but the others were fresh still.

  Even in the presence of the quiet dead it is not easy to control one’s thoughts. My first one was, who in the world would have done this for that very unpopular old woman, my great aunt? My second was that she herself would have called it a sinful waste, and Popish at that.

  So who? Miss Linsey’s ghosts? My dead mother and her long-dead gipsy, creeping after dark into the cemetery with this charming tribute to someone whom, in life, she had disliked, even hated, whose viper’s tongue had driven her from home? If there was any sort of truth in Miss Linsey’s tale of lights and people at the grave, no ghosts had put these flowers there. Then who? Not Gran; she had known that I would visit the grave-plot, and she surely would have told me if she had asked anyone else to bring flowers.

  A sudden breeze stirred the grasses by the wall, sending a couple of petals floating to the ground, and bringing with it the scent of roses, and with the scent, a vivid memory of a garden crammed with roses and lupins and all the flowers of summer. Miss Mildred’s garden. Miss Mildred, the one person I knew whose simple loving kindness would have embraced even Aunt Betsy. Whose loving kindness put me to shame.

  I detached a sprig of the cottage rose from the bunch in my basket, and laid it on her grave, then turned to give the rest to Granddad.

  He, too, had been visited. In the vase near the headstone was a bunch of roses, chief among them the silvery pink of his beloved Old Blush.

  ‘Who in the world?’ I asked. ‘Miss Mildred?’

  ‘Might be,’ said Davey. He had returned with a can of water, and we had puzzled over it together. There was no card or message. ‘But I’ve not seen flowers here before. Well, we can ask her, but I doubt it’s not her.’

  Another ‘we’, and in its own way as comforting as Mr Blaney’s. I smiled at him, and knelt to replace the fading roses in the vase with the fresh ones I had brought. ‘Then who?’

  ‘Dear knows, but you see what it might mean? Look at those flowers. The garden ones are still okay, but the wild ones, the cornflowers and such, they’re all dead. Which they would be, if they’ve been there since Sunday.’

  I sat back on my heels, staring up at him. ‘Then you really think that? Miss Linsey’s ghosts?’

  ‘I reckon so. Who else? It fits. Somebody brought them. Somebody’s been here. It could be folk your aunt had known at home in Scotland, maybe, visiting nearby, and they came over, and old Linsey-woolsey saw them.’

  ‘But Davey, they vanished. She said they just disappeared.’

  He pointed to the door we had come in by. ‘She’d have come in by the main gate. If her two ghosts came in the way we did and left the door open, it’s only a couple of steps out to the road, and they’d gone. It was pretty dark Sunday night.’

  ‘Ye-es. Yes, you could be right. But who? And if it was friends of the family, Gran’s family, why didn’t they go into the village, to see your mother, perhaps? Or to Rose Cottage—’ I stopped.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Davey. ‘That’s what it comes to, isn’t it? They did go to Rose Cottage. They may have come to see Mum as well, but there was nobody home at our place last weekend. Look, let’s not worry about it now. If they came to leave flowers here, they mean no harm to you and yours, that’s for sure. And if you’re thinking what I think you are, stop it.’

  ‘I – I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Then don’t try. Have you finished your flowers?’

  ‘Yes.’ I stood up, watching while he tilted the can to trickle water into the vases. ‘Look, why don’t we stop by Witches’ Corner and ask Miss Mildred if she brought the flowers. Get that bit clear, at least.’

  ‘No good. She’s not home. She went into Sunderland this morning, and it’s my guess the two of them’ll go to the pictures and get home late. There, I needn’t have bothered to get the water. There’s plenty. Hang on while I tip the rest out. Those pansies could do with a drop, and that rose bush by the wall. That’s it. Okay. Tell you what, we’ll go home, and Mum’ll give us some dinner, and maybe talk some sense into us.’

  As it happened, Mrs Pascoe did not get the chance, as, by unspoken consent, neither Davey nor I mentioned Miss Linsey or the riddle of the cemetery. We told her merely that we had met in Gipsy Lonnen, and that he had gone back with me to put flowers on the graves, and brought me home for dinner.

  ‘If that’s all right?’ I said. An unexpected guest could pose problems with food rationing.

  ‘Lord bless you, child, of course it is. There’s plenty, and you’re welcome. Davey, get her a knife and fork, and go and call your father.’

  She refused my offer of help, told me briskly to sit down, and began to dish up a large chicken pie. ‘And had old Tom been doing a good job on the graves?’

  ‘Mr Corner told me he was still sexton, and I could hardly believe it! Does he do it all himself still? I used to think he was about a hundred, and that’s years ago.’

  ‘Eighty-two, and won’t even talk about retiring. He does get help with the grave-digging, though.’

  ‘Well, the place was very tidy, and the grave looked fine.’ I hesitated, then asked her merely if Miss Mildred was in the habit of taking flowers to the cemetery. She knew nothing about that, she said, with a kind of snort, but she did know that poor Miss Mildred wasn’t even welcome, these days, to take them to the church, since the vicar’s wife fancied her own stuff so much, and looked down her nose at other people’s.

  ‘And now there’s none coming in from the Hall – here, Jim,’ as Mr Pascoe and Davey came in, ‘yours is ready.’ She set his plate down, and spooned potatoes. ‘Have you washed your hands, Davey?’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ said Davey, and winked at me as he took his place.

  Mr Pascoe greeted me as he sat down. He was a quiet, mild-mannered man, who was known for miles around as an excellent craftsman. He was, in looks, an older version of Davey; an inch or so shorter, perhaps, and with the thicker body and greying hair of middle age, but the same grey eyes and indefinabl
e poise of self-belief that marks the man who knows his limitations, but who also knows what he is good for, and expects – and receives – the respect it brings him. It was a dignity which, I supposed, carried over from the other part of his profession. He was, of course, the local undertaker.

  ‘Davey says you’ve been to see the graves? They’d be all right, old Tom does the grass every Friday, rain or shine. By the way, Kathy, I’ve been on to Caslaws, and they’ll do your move for you Monday at latest, but there’s a chance of Saturday, so you’d best be ready. Davey can take time off to give you a hand.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘You’re welcome, you know that. Give the girl some more of those potatoes, Mother. She’ll be on short rations down there at the cottage.’

  ‘No, really, I’ve got plenty. The pie’s lovely, Aunty Annie.’

  Mrs Pascoe primmed her lips, looking pleased. ‘Well, eat up,’ she said, and sitting down she began to ask me about the Brandons and Gran’s new house, while Davey and his father ate busily and, when they spoke at all, exchanged brief comments about the work they were doing at the Hall.

  I helped clear the plates, and while Mrs Pascoe was dishing the pudding – a hearty syrup sponge – I asked her, ‘Was there much damage done at the Hall in the war? Gran said it was a mess, though I suppose you can’t blame the boys. The RAF, I mean.’

  She gave me a quick, sideways look. ‘Nobody blames them, poor lads. We all know what they did for us, and if that’s any comfort to you, it’s the truth.’

  ‘Thank you. These two plates for the men?’

  ‘That one was for you. If it’s too much, give it to Davey. No, the Hall wasn’t too bad, really, just scratches and chips everywhere, and the floors a bit of a mess. Nothing that can’t be repaired, with a bit of plaster and a lick of paint and some polish to bring it up lovely again. No real harm done. We’d moved some of the breakables down to the cellar, and the carpets from the drawing room, and the pictures, and things like that. The books are still down there.’