The Magdalena Curse

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The Magdalena Curse Page 12

by F. G. Cottam


  But his dad was away. And Adam had never been away from his dad since the day of his mother’s and sister’s deaths. Mark had told her that himself. There was every chance that Mark would feel the separation more acutely than his son. It was Elizabeth’s experience that children were much less sentimental than adults tended to be. But she thought it best to keep him occupied and entertained and then pack him off to bed when he was tired enough to fall asleep without pondering his father’s sudden absence. He had been told his dad had needed to go off on business.

  ‘Business?’ he had said. ‘What business? Your business used to be jumping out of aeroplanes with a big gun. You’re a bit old for that these days, Dad. And you’ve given your army clothes back. Plus, I don’t see any big gun.’

  But he had not questioned further. He trusted his father. He had never in his life been given any reason not to do so.

  The woman Mark had employed on her own recommendation had prepared a dinner of roast chicken and put it in the oven half an hour before Elizabeth’s arrival at the house. She washed up and changed in the spare room and Adam chatted to her as she boiled the potatoes and steamed the broccoli and peas and made gravy. Her mother had taught her to cook. It was her mother’s recipe she followed almost without conscious thought as she made the gravy for their roast dinner. She felt ambivalent about her mother, she realised. She had always taken Mum for granted, as she imagined most grown-up daughters did. But now she wondered how well she actually knew her. Certainly she now thought there was more to her than the sweet, elderly, forgetful caricature recent years had allowed her mother to become in her mind prior to Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Elizabeth?’

  ‘Adam.’

  He was seated at the kitchen table taking the tyres off a toy car. ‘Can I have a Diet Coke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Your dad told me your regular tipple is apple juice. Nothing carbonated. No caffeine.’

  ‘My dad’s a monster when it comes to nutrition.’

  ‘He’s responsible for your health, Adam.’

  ‘He knows no mercy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go quite that far. There’s apple crumble and ice cream for pudding.’

  ‘I see you’ve got some greens on the go.’

  At the sink, Elizabeth drained the broccoli. ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  ‘I suppose it could be worse,’ Adam said. ‘It could be Brussels sprouts.’

  ‘And we all know what they do, don’t we?’

  He grinned at her. ‘They make you blow off,’ he said. ‘Like a wizard.’

  She peered through the oven’s glass door. The chicken looked ready. She thought that Adam Hunter was definitely on the mend.

  After dinner they played a couple of games of chess. Adam won both, Elizabeth sensed with something to spare. She was reminded that this was a boy who could read fluently at the age of three. Things came very easily to him. He was extremely bright and, physically, nothing short of beautiful. He should not have had a care in the world. After the chess, he asked if he could watch a DVD. Elizabeth would have baulked at one of the spookier Dr Who episodes; but his choice was a Jeremy Clarkson programme in which Clarkson made fun of some easy automotive targets and then destroyed examples of these sad vehicles from the dark days of British engineering and design by dropping them from a crane. There was a popcorn maker in the kitchen. Elizabeth made Adam popcorn with hot maple syrup and butter and he ate it lounging on the sofa, laughing at Clarkson’s grown-up schoolboy antics, yawning when the programme finished, definitely ready for bed.

  He stood up and stretched. ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t forget to brush your teeth.’

  ‘I won’t. Will you come and check on me in ten minutes?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He just stood there. She realised that he expected a goodnight kiss. Of course he did, his father never failed to provide him with one. Elizabeth pecked him on the cheek and ruffled his hair and he reached around her waist and hugged her.

  ‘Goodnight, Adam.’

  He smiled. ‘Your popcorn is epic,’ he said.

  When she checked on him ten minutes later he was deeply and restfully asleep. On her return to the sofa in the sitting room, she picked up her phone and saw that someone had texted her. Mobile reception was patchy in the area at best and the text could have been sent hours earlier and only just reached her. Anything urgent and it would be the message light flashing, not the text icon showing on the display. But she opened and read the text anyway. To Elizabeth’s great surprise, it was from her mother. She had not even known her mother could text. She smiled to herself, but the smile was grim. She was learning more about her mother all the time.

  The text was a question. Her mother wanted to know whether Elizabeth had made any inquiries about the Campbell witch trial archive left among his papers by Judge Jerusalem Smith. She scrolled down and saw that the text had been sent at 6.05 p.m. Her mother had allowed her one working day in which to contact the British Library. But given that she was in no position to plan an imminent trip to London, she had not even thought to do so. In her mother’s mind, there was clearly urgency here. It was as though her mother was in a hurry for her to discover something. Elizabeth wondered why. She did not think the reason for her mother’s anxiety likely to be a very happy one. She did not think any truth she might uncover likely to be innocent. There was nothing good or wholesome about the one relic of Ruth Campbell carved in singed oak in the stable at her family home, was there?

  She took the Clarkson DVD out of the machine and put it back in its case with the others, stored in a neat row under the player. Most of the DVDs were feature films and it was very much a boys’ collection: Gladiator, Casino Royale, Men in Black and The Bourne Ultimatum. There was a discerning section Mark must have hand-picked for Adam; vintage action films such as The Vikings and Jason and the Argonauts and Eighties children’s classics including The Goonies, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator. There were Torchwood and Doctor Who of course. And there was Clarkson. And there was a narrow section of cases with hand-written titles on their spines. Klosters, 2007, one of these said. Elizabeth took it out and slipped the disc into the player. Maybe it was morbid to watch a Hunter family home movie. Certainly it was an invasion of privacy. But she also thought it might justifiably be called background on her patient.

  Klosters was cold. The light was flat, the sky overcast. The snow had that fluffy, powdery consistency it only has when the air is so far below freezing point that there is no moisture in it at all. The family were well wrapped up against the elements in ski suits and gloves. They wore hats and hoods and masks. Their features were completely concealed. Mark, presumably, was behind the camera as his lost daughter skied towards him down a long, steep slope followed by her brother and then, lastly, by her mother. They were all obviously expert skiers. But Kate had a particular grace and lightness, a distinctive poise. She skied very fast but was totally in control of her neat, rapid turns as she descended and then stopped with a slewed flourish inches from the lens. Her breath came through the scarf covering the lower half of her face and clouded on the frozen air. She lifted her mask and her eyes smiled. And Elizabeth remembered that she had been on the way to a ballet class at the time of her death and wondered how Mark ever found the strength to watch what she was watching now. Probably, she thought, he did not.

  Adam came next. He hurtled down the slope, taking moguls straight on as jumps, skiing on the edge of control, almost achieving with strength and athleticism the speed his sister had reached with her pure and effortless talent.

  Lastly, Lillian came down. Even in her ski clothes, Elizabeth could see that she was slender. She wore her hair long. It switched against her shoulders in a light-brown ponytail when she executed her turns on the steep slope. Like her daughter, she skied very gracefully. Adam made a crack to his father about how slow she was and Mark chuckled and the camera trembled s
lightly in his hand but it did not shift from its subject or lose focus. She was not slow at all; she was rhythmic until she checked at the bottom of the slope and planted her poles. The rhythm stopped and she bowed her head and regained her breath after the effort of the long descent. She said something. She made a joke about how unfit she was. She had the cut-glass enunciation of a privileged English birth and upbringing. She shed her gloves, took off her hair tie and shook out her ponytail. She lifted her head and slipped her mask up to her forehead and unwound the scarf concealing the lower half of her face. She looked into the camera lens, grinned and shaped a kiss, and Elizabeth found herself staring back into her own laughing eyes as they looked out at her from the Hunters’ plasma television screen.

  She had been eating the remnants of Adam’s popcorn. She only became aware of that now as the bowl fumbled through her fingers on to the rug.

  ‘Jesus. Jesus Christ.’

  There was a cry from upstairs. Elizabeth stood and turned off the DVD player and went to see what the matter was with Adam. No wonder, she thought, he had felt entitled to a goodnight kiss.

  Hunter suspected that the food was delicious. Dying, he thought that Miss Hall probably lived very well. There was, no doubt, an excellent chef somewhere in the depths of her house above the lake every bit as much in thrall to his mistress as was the Comte. But he could not taste anything as the wine was served, as the bread was torn, as the courses came and went. His hostess ate prodigiously. But her rate of consumption of food was nowhere equal to the hunger of the thing eating her from within. She did not have long. It was the only certainty, Hunter felt. And it gave him no comfort.

  ‘You have the skill of scrutinising without appearing to do so, Colonel. Your training, I suppose. Eat something. You will need the nourishment to sustain you.’

  ‘In Bolivia, how did you know our names?’

  She sipped wine and grimaced, as though the question was unworthy of reply.

  ‘How could we surprise you if you knew our names?’

  ‘I was wholly preoccupied with my struggle with Mrs Mallory. I had only that moment achieved victory in the encounter when your dashing Major blundered in and complicated things. Ordinarily, your approach would have been something to which both of us would have been alert long before you breached the perimeter fence. But we were engaged with one another. It distracted us.’

  ‘How old was Mrs Mallory?’

  ‘It is of no importance.’

  ‘Indulge me.’

  ‘She was young when the century was young.’

  ‘She claimed she comforted the poet Rupert Brooke.’

  Miss Hall sawed at the meat on her plate. It was very rare and glistened under the yellow electric light. ‘Not that century, you fool. She was young when the French dragoons trampled her father’s harvest and looted his harvested crops on their route through her family’s land on their way to Moscow. They laughed, under their plumes, in their bright, braided tunics from their saddles. They were not laughing when the winter came and inflicted the long agony of their retreat.’

  ‘She cursed them?’

  Miss Hall rested her knife and fork to either side of her plate. ‘Russia cursed them. The weather gods cursed them. Perhaps Mrs Mallory cursed them too. She was not Mrs Mallory then, of course, that conceit came much later. And whatever comfort she offered Brooke would have been cold indeed. Consolation is not among her skills.’

  Hunter nodded.

  ‘Or instincts.’ Miss Hall shuddered. ‘But you are making me digress. What is important is that your intervention with the gun enabled her escape from the fate I had planned for her. She had gambled against me and lost and had accepted the consequence. She is nothing, if not a woman of her word. So she was reconciled. Then you released her. That’s history, though. What matters is what she intends to do now her power is almost restored to her.’

  ‘What will she do?’

  ‘Listen to your son. He will tell you. Before he loses his mind and perishes, he will indulge the affliction of prophesy. She will brag through him, her instrument. That is your curse.’

  Hunter shifted in his chair. The chair was wooden and ornate and the high carved back painful against his bruised spine and shoulders. He was being asked to believe in the spite of a sorceress who had witnessed the marauding arrival of the horsemen of Napoleon’s invading army as a young girl. He had put two bullets squarely into a woman’s brain and was being told that a decade on she lived unscathed, gaining power. He had heard the voices emanate from his son’s mouth while the boy slept. He could feel the throb of impact still, under the blood congealing in his hair from when the dying creature opposite had earlier toyed with him. And he remembered what had happened in Bolivia. He had spent the better part of twelve years attempting to forget it. But he had brought it all back in his lakeside hotel room and he knew he would never now forget the oppression of the canvas labyrinth or the smell of the Major’s mutilation or the sight of his wife’s features worn on the face of the witch in Magdalena. He sighed. In the chamber where he sat, the wooden walls were furtive with movement. Behind him, the Comte waited, silent and obsequious. Across the table, Miss Hall ate methodically, the scrabble of silver cutlery on the bone china of her plate like dancing insect limbs.

  ‘Why was she so angry? It seems to me that the intervention of the Major was her reprieve. How did he incur this wrath? Why did she punish him in so vile and brutal a manner?’

  Miss Hall smiled. ‘How well did you know the Major?’

  ‘He was brave and intelligent. He was learned. I had known him only for a few hours. I knew him hardly at all.’

  ‘He was a devout Catholic. He was one of three brothers. There was the Franciscan, the Jesuit and the soldier. It was our misfortune, and his, to encounter the soldier. He approached us with his carbine trained on us and a rosary wound around the barrel of the weapon. He was incanting some prayer to his Catholic God. It was this that enraged Mrs Mallory.’

  ‘How do I stop her, Miss Hall? Do I burn her at the stake? Put a pointed wooden stake through her heart? Do I buy some silver bullets for my gun?’

  ‘Sarcasm is not helpful.’

  ‘It is when it’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘First, you must find her. I cannot even help you in that. I do not have the time left for the pursuit.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Whether you are or you are not is immaterial. You are here because I am more good than bad, despite what you might think evidential to the contrary. Even if I had the time to help you find Mrs Mallory, I am too debilitated by illness to confront her as I once did. And she is cunning and a quick learner, so I doubt I would have the wit to trick her again. You must find a way. I will tell you what I know. You must track her like prey and then like prey you must kill her. I will tell you everything I know about your quarry. I can furnish one address where you might learn something.’

  Hunter sat forward, alert.

  ‘No, Colonel. I do not think you will find her there. But you will find her spoor. You will pick up her scent.’ Miss Hall hesitated over her next words. ‘Mrs Mallory likes to live. And that might yet be her downfall.’

  ‘What do you mean, she likes to live?’

  Miss Hall exposed her teeth in a decaying smile. ‘In life, to use the current idiom, Mrs Mallory likes to party.’

  It was very late when the Comte drove Hunter the steep route back down to his hotel. Or it was very early, because it was now Tuesday morning. Despite his nap on the Monday afternoon, he felt tired the way that combat left you feeling, bone weary, his stomach and the back of his throat sour with spent adrenaline. This low feeling usually followed a combat high. On this occasion there had been no high, only the low and the listlessness and inability to think with urgent clarity.

  His expedition had been open-ended in the sense that he had not told Elizabeth Bancroft exactly when he would return. He had figured on anything from one night away to a week. The address Miss Hall had given him was a lodge
, high and remote in the Austrian Tyrol. It did not sound like the home address of someone who liked to party. Hunter thought something like a Venice palazzo or a Manhattan loft apartment much more likely bets on that score. He had met Mrs Mallory in Magdalena. In life, in the brief time she had revealed her true face to him, she had been nothing if not glamorous. But Miss Hall had been adamant that he would not find his adversary at the lodge perched at the top of the mountain. Perhaps it was a place where she had stored things. If so, he hoped the things she had stored were not trophies.

  He had not really been convinced by talk of her spoor. This was because he could not believe in the notion of her as prey. That would surely be a very dangerous conceit. He had no choice but to try to destroy her. What he had learned in the last hours from Miss Hall made her eradication the most important mission of his life. But he had tried before and apparently failed when her powers had been depleted. He did not underestimate the difficulty of the challenge. Even the term adversary, with its implication of a somehow equal match, seemed arrogant. At the start of their evening, Miss Hall had teased and pawed him like a cat with a mouse. And she was weak. Miss Hall was dying.

  He would sleep for a couple of hours and then call Elizabeth before her departure for her rounds and explain that he would return after two more nights away. With luck, he would be able to have a chat with Adam and gauge his son’s mood. Adam was as reticent with his father on the phone as most children of his age were, answering any question with a cheery monosyllable. But even his tone would tell Hunter what he needed to know, give him the reassurance that Miss Hall was keeping her word about holding the dreams, for the duration, at bay. He thought she would. He considered Miss Hall honourable in her way and honest too. But he did not think she felt such things as pity or compassion. And she would not feel compelled to act out of either urge. Compassion, when all was said and done, whether you regarded it as indulgence or attribute, was a very human impulse.

 

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