‘What does the rhyme mean?’ I asked him.
‘It’s essentially to do with binding her, shutting her up where she couldn’t do harm. You see, Hawkins was besotted with her some while, but then he began to be afraid of her. He’s said to have told the priest, “She will sit quiet all day and only look at me.” When the priest said that many a man would be thankful for such a placid, adoring wife, Hawkins replied she did not look on him, but into him. And he said that once he had told her hotly to leave off, for he was a sinner like all men, and if she would keep on staring in such a way, she would see his foul and mortal corruption. To which she gave this strange response: “Men say always they are wretched and tainted by flesh and sin, but in all men there is such goodness and beauty, as in the earth and all living things, that it is to me like my food and drink, and I can never be tired of having it.” ’
When Farbody told me this, there in that warm and pleasant room, the sunlight on the books and the domestic pipe-smoke mild in the air, the hair rose on my neck.
‘In heaven’s name,’ I said.
The scholar smiled again, pleased with himself and with the peculiar tale he had memorized so well. ‘Yes, something in that gives you a turn, doesn’t it? She seems to be speaking so charmingly, innocently, and it makes the skin creep. I can tell you, sir, I read this story first when I was a boy of eleven, and I was awake nights after, until my mother scolded some reason into me and hid the volume I’d been reading. Which may explain,’ he added amiably, ‘my lifelong quest for such hidden trifles of knowledge.’
Farbody then went on with the narrative.
Josebaar turned quickly from love to shrinking horror at his young wife. At first he tried to arrange a separation between them, but she would have none of this; then he had thoughts of escaping her by going overseas. But she guessed his course, and is said to have assured him she loved him too well to let him go. If he must leave, she would find and follow him, and he did not doubt that she had the powers to do so.
In the end, Hawkins, pale and harried, went to his friends, among whom was the priest, and confessed he was in such fear that he should not ‘soon remain alive, since the woman eats me up from the inside out’. By what grim stages the others came round to Hawkins’s state of mind, Farbody said one might only conjecture, and similarly if any money was involved in it. ‘But those were ignorant and superstitious times,’ he reflected. ‘Alas, they are still.’ Whatever went on, whatever the span of its duration, a plan was presently devised to rid Josebaar Hawkins of the woman.
‘He pretended to her that he had only been testing her with his talk of going off, to see how much she loved him. And finding her so faithful, he meant to reward her. He told her he had put by an especial gift for her, an heirloom of his family, kept in a wooden chest in the attics of the house. But it would amuse him if she would go up and look first through the wood of its lid, and so say what she saw, before he unlocked the chest and gave her the trophy. Well, it seems she could easily see through wood but not through her husband, and up she went. No sooner was she in the room with the empty chest than he slammed closed the door and secured it. And then at once came a gang of men and bricked the door up, and others came along the roof to seal and brick up the window.’
The bizarre quality of Farbody’s recitation was added to, for me, by a sense of historical fact that seemed to underlie the whole. I found myself asking abruptly, ‘Could she not have opened the window – or broken the pane, before the roof-gang reached her?’
‘No, dear sir. Remember, the glass in those days was of much thicker and sturdier stuff than the flimsy crystal of our day. Besides, Hawkins had previously pinned the window shut. I mean, he had driven iron pins through the frame to the brickwork, and hammered in longer pins lengthwise all across.’
‘Hence the horrible rhyme: a brick and a pin.’
‘Just so. Besides, too, she was very high up, and the men anyway would have thrust her back – she was physically no match for them. They must have been a harsh crew. All the while they were doing it, blocking her in to die the slow death of starvation and thirst, Amber Maria was shrieking, imploring them. And after they had finished, she screamed and howled in her prison for uncountable days and nights, before she fell silent for ever. There are many reports of this.’
I shuddered. ‘In God’s name, you speak as if it really happened.’
He looked at me. ‘My dear sir, it did. I can make no claims for her sorcery, but the facts of her death are undoubtedly true. Some years after, Josebaar Hawkins was hanged for her murder. For he confessed to it, having had not a quiet hour since.’
‘And then? Did they unlock the room?’
‘That they did not. The story concludes with that asseveration. No one would go near the house, let alone pull bricks away from any part of it. That they left, and leave, to the mercy of God.’
I sat some while in silence. Perhaps, very likely, I looked grim or rattled, for the scholar came and refilled my glass and moved the biscuit plate nearer my elbow.
‘The children’s rhyme,’ said Farbody, ‘as you’re aware, has its own oddities. The brick and the pin relate to the window and door, the sealing of the room. I’ve come across one text which states that Amber Maria could see only through natural substances, and that therefore a brick, which is man-mixed, would defeat her gaze, just as would refined metal; obviously the very reason why she could detect coins in the ground, rather than see through these also. But do you recall that other line, She leaps at the moon?’
I said that I did.
‘Salter’s Lane,’ said the scholar, ‘has nothing to do with the salting trade. Indeed, one wouldn’t expect it, so far as we are here from the sea. No, the word salter relates to the Latin saltare, to leap. In medieval times, that area of the woods was known to be a place where witches held their revels and danced the Wild Dance for their lord, Satan, “leaping high as the moon”. Which moon, of course, is a calendar feature of the sabbat, whether full or horned for the Devil.’
Just then the doorbell jangled. My aunt had returned for me. I was astonished to see, glancing at Farbody’s clock, that only half an hour had elapsed. But then, I suppose I was struggling back to my own time, across the centuries.
I thanked him and, going out with my aunt into the summer street, I resolved to shake myself free of the unnaturally strong emotion that had dropped upon me. And so we went to our luncheon.
Three or four days later I, reluctantly but evincing cheerfulness, accompanied my aunt to a church tea party, held in honour of the new bell which had recently been installed, and for which everyone had, the year before, been engaged in fund-raising. Here the social classes mingled with uneasy and ill-founded camaraderie, and I was revealed to a succession of people of all types, to whom it seemed my aunt wished to show off her nephew. Touched by her pride in me, I did my best to be jolly.
‘And look,’ said Aunt Alice, ‘there is Daffodil Sempson. Or rather, Mrs King, as she is married to a hotel-keeper at St Leonards now, and has come for the first time to visit her sister. They are a somewhat estranged family. None of them is in service now, but in her youth, Daffodil was lady’s maid to the Misses Condimer, and travelled all over Europe with them, before she was even seventeen. A great advantage for any girl.’
Struck, I admit, by the name Daffodil, I turned, and saw a very pleasing young woman, dressed most stylishly, a trick no doubt learnt during her travels with the minor aristocracy.
‘By all means introduce me to her,’ I told my aunt, with a more genuine enthusiasm.
But neither of us was able to catch the lady’s eye. She seemed to be fixedly interested in something that was going on at the far end of the room, where several people were walking about, and the tables groaned beneath their loads of cakes and lemonade.
‘I wonder what has engaged her attention so,’ speculated my aunt.
Mrs King, née Sempson, was staring now almost unnaturally. Then I saw her turn her pretty head, seem to check, an
d then once more compulsively gaze back towards the tables.
Suddenly she quite changed colour. I have been witness to several instances of abrupt illness, slight or extreme. Mrs King seemed in the grip of the latter. Her face took on not a white but a thickly shining, greenish pallor. Without thinking I moved towards her. But in that moment she dropped to the ground.
At once she was surrounded by women, one of whom must have been her sister. Presently she was carried away.
From all sides came sympathetic murmurs concerning the heat.
To my sorrow, Mrs King did not return to enjoy the over-bountiful tea. My aunt made enquiries of her sister, who said that Daffodil was been obliged to be sent home in the pony cart. ‘It is a great nuisance, as she intended returning to St Leonards tomorrow, and now she won’t be well enough.’
‘Is her indisposition more serious than we had hoped?’ asked my aunt.
‘Oh,’ said the sister, blinking at me with eyes not half so fine as her sibling’s, ‘she makes a fuss about it. She has these delicate ways from her younger years. I may say, she’d never have dared go on so then. They would have dismissed her.’
‘I thought,’ said I sternly, ‘that she seemed most unwell.’
‘No, it isn’t that she’s ill,’ declared the vulgar sister, whose hat might have been a lesson to us all in the virtues of regret. ‘She says it’s something that she saw in Austria, once.’ My aunt and I evidenced incomprehension. The sister said, ‘I can say nothing of it. She refuses to explain. She says it’s too dreadful, and it’s taken her these six years to put it from her, and now she’s been reminded and will need to stay in bed, with me expected to be flapping round her all day long, and neglecting my duties and Pa.’
We extricated ourselves from the uninspiring Miss Sempson and soon after left the tea party. As we were going out I remember that Aunt Alice said to me, ‘There is disappointing Mr Polleto. I understand he contributed generously to the bell fund, which I find curious, since he’s far from affluent, and never attends the church. Nor is he sociable. Did you happen to notice him this afternoon?’
I said that he might easily go unnoticed, but that I had not, I thought, seen him. Nor had I.
The day before my departure from Steepleford, I had planned a walk through the woods. Whether or not I would approach the stretch of the Lane that ran by Josebaar Hawkins’s house I was myself unsure. In any event, a sudden thunderstorm erupted. Its violence and tenacity were such that I gave over any idea of walking, and spent all that last day with my aunt. The following morning we parted most affectionately, and I returned to London. A month later I went abroad and spent the rest of the year in Rome, in which ancient, imperial and legend-haunted city it may be supposed Steepleford and all its tales sank in my memory to a depth of fathoms.
Just after the New Year, I spent a day or so again at Steepleford. This time, there was snow down, but a flawless snow, thick and solid to tread upon, the weather chill and fine. Had I truly forgotten the house in Salter’s Lane? I think that I had in everything but my heart. I took my way across the white fields, admiring the shapes of everything, each changed by its cover of pale fleece, then strayed off into the ancient woods, which were like a cathedral of purest ice.
And then somehow, in the way these things turn out, I took at random another of the silent avenues, and found myself ten minutes later at one of the several openings into the Lane. I had been walking by then for more than two hours, and it seemed foolish not to follow this path back to the town.
Soon I reckoned I had been wise to do so. The low afternoon sun was clouding over and a mauve cast hid the sky. So I strode briskly, thinking of a warm fire ahead and other cheer, and came level with the high wall of Josebaar Hawkins’s ill-starred house.
At first I think I did not recognize it, for like everything else it was plastered with white. But then I got a great shock, and stopped dead in my tracks.
‘What has happened here?’ I asked, perhaps aloud. Until that time, the trees of the old estate had made a second wall behind the first, and the pile of the building had been visible only in portions, as I have previously described. Now, looking beyond one huge holly tree, I gained abruptly a view of the entire upper front aspect – all of it, its timber, stone and brickwork, the roof and chimneys, and every cold window, glaring as if it were eye to eye with me, like some person who has suddenly whipped from their face a mask.
Astonished, I attempted to reason how this should be. It was not that the trees were bare. No, it was that every tree, saving the holly, which in any case stood this side of the wall, had been brought down.
I confess that meeting the house like this, head-on, unnerved me. I made no secret of that to myself. But in a moment or so, I had a rational thought. Some vandals had been at work in the ‘grounds’. They had chopped down the trees and carted them away, no doubt to provide firewood for needy winter hearths.
On the strength of this rationale, an unusual, perhaps a boy’s desire took me, having seen so much, to scale the wall and peer over into the precincts of the house, now open to be studied. I have to say too that my peculiar eagerness to do this was prompted, I now think, more by an aversion to doing it, rather than a longing after secrets. It was like a dare one must not evade, for fear of being thought – worst of all by oneself – a coward.
I am quite strong and fit. The wall had inconsistencies and irregular stones in plenty. Despite the snow, I got up it in less than three minutes, and, perched there on the top, stared down into the gardens.
They were the most desolate sight. Patches of snow lay all about, but the ground had turned dark, and in places black, the snowfall having partly melted away as it already had on some of the higher trees in the woods. There was a good reason for this. Any sun that fell here must fall directly over everything since nothing now stood between it and the ground, only the house. Every tree and shrub that had grown, rampantly and untended, within the walls had been felled and, presumably, taken away. And I wondered who could have made so bold after all these hundred and more years.
Then something else caught my eye. There was, toward the side of the house, a sort of ornamental little building, perhaps a folly. It was ruinous and falling down, and its demise seemed to have been hastened by a young oak tree, which had toppled aslant upon its roof, and leaned there yet.
So why then, I wondered, had the wood-stealing vandals not carted off also this ready-felled tree? There it lay, as useful as any other timber, bare and exposed, its dislocated branches creaking in some unfelt wind, clear as complaining voices in the stillness.
There were no birds, of course. There was, as before, no sound – beyond, this time, the creaking of the fallen tree’s branches. But this effect had been common through much of the woods, as the day advanced and the winter sun prepared to leave the earth. Until this point I had not noted it particularly.
Now I did. For here the absence of all sound, save that sinister creaking whine of broken branches, seemed heavy with presage. The air smelled sour, and faintly dirty, like one might expect in the centre of an industrial town, where smoke and cinders fall and make each breath lifeless, and potent with disease.
And then, even as I sat there gazing at it, the unlikeliest thing occurred. The leaning dead oak tree swayed, and out of it there burst a shower of dry pieces, splinters of wood ejected, and then one whole limb snapped off and dropped, disintegrating even as it went, so that by the instant it touched the ground, there was no more left of it than dust. What had caused such a thing? The action of some animal? No animal was in the vicinity, so much was plain. The simple process of a slow decay, then, electing to finish its work coincidentally with my scrutiny? I had the strangest notion that, simply by staring at the tree, I had hastened the branch’s breaking off and dissolution.
And then, and then, I knew that it was not I. I had not caused it. Across my scalp my hair crawled as if filled by icy tricklings. Against my will, it seemed to me, yet no more resistible than as if at the pu
ll of a chain of steel, my head turned and tilted back, and I looked up the unmasked face of that house, towards its highest casements.
There was not a creeper left upon any of them. Even the snow had been leached away. But oh, something white there was, which stood at the window, looking out, and out.
I can put down here only what I saw. I saw a woman’s shape. Her gown I cannot detail, nor how her hair was dressed, though it seemed to me that both were disordered. Her features I could not see, and that had nothing to do with distance, and I believe nothing to do with light or shade. She had no features, none. That is, she had only one feature. She had two eyes. But her eyes were set in that featureless whiteness of a shape like two burned holes. They were not eyes at all – but . . . they were eyes, more eyes than are possible to any thing that lives.
I remember little of my descent of the wall. Perhaps I fell from it. Certainly I think some of it crumbled and broke away too, as I slipped down. And then I fled along the Lane, and this I do recall. I fled and I whimpered like a man pursued by the dogs of hell that are really fiends, and they will tear him, even his soul, if they catch him. But they did not catch me, and I reached the town. And then came maybe the most sinister and curious thing of all.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 47