Black Heather

by Virginia Coffman

  While I stared at this eerie thing, so like a weird old hag, Timothy leaped up from where he had crouched by the door of the inn and sped out into the desolate garden. Whatever this was at the head of the stairs, Timothy had sensed it too.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I stared upward in a paralysis of terror, half-convinced by the actions of a cat and the fancy of a dying man that there really was a ghostly presence at the head of the stairs watching me.

  Some slight sound outside shook me out of this dreadful stupor. I blinked, then felt vainly for the pulse of the man whose life had been snuffed out by that peculiar hallucination. My hands shook so much that I found it difficult to command myself, but when I looked up the staircase again over the stranger’s dead body, whatever grouping of light and shadow had joined to form the stranger’s “haunt” was now dissolved into nothingness. I felt myself alone, terribly, painfully alone. I had no more hope for the dead man; and for myself, I felt a frantic anxiety to get some human being besides myself into this place, to scour it from top to bottom, conclusively destroying all dust, cobwebs, fire debris, and anything else that might be mistaken for ghosts or haunts.

  When I was absolutely sure the man was dead, I got up painfully, tried to lay him out on the floor where he had fallen, and went out of the Hag’s Head. I began to descend the slope upon which the inn stood. In a few minutes I was running. It did not surprise me when Timothy darted along beside me, staying close, never scampering off to himself as he had the day before.

  How long it was before we reached a well-traveled little carriage road I do not know, but when we had walked for several minutes along the wagon ruts through dying heather, a horse came trotting along behind us, dragging a gig which rattled and shook as though the wheels might roll off at any minute.

  Seated in it were Patrick Kelleher and a beautiful red-haired woman who looked vaguely familiar.

  What a rogue he is with the women, I thought. First, the unfortunate Megan Sedley; then Megan's niece, the celebrated beauty Elspeth; then his easy, smooth flattery in my direction, and all the time this obvious understanding with the red-haired woman.

  “Jassy,” he said to her briskly, with an indifference that seemed to me insulting, “make place for the pretty Kate.”

  “Jassy?” I repeated with the sickened realization that this woman’s name had been on the lips of that poor Yorkshireman whose body lay now, untended, on the floor of the Hag’s Head.

  I remembered at last where I had seen the woman before and heard her name. It had been in the taproom of the Owl of York, into whose steaming confines Patrick had wheedled me this morning. When I repeated her name and, after picking up Timmy, hesitated to climb into the gig, crowding its occupants, she looked a trifle surprised.

  “Yes? You know my name?”

  “It was a man who spoke the name,” I explained, then paused, wondering how much of a shock his death would be.

  Patrick began to look uneasy. He peered off in the direction I had taken across the heath and furze bushes.

  “Is Macrae looking for her? Did he seem out of sorts?”

  “Drunk, I’ll wager!” said Jassy in disgust, not very much interested.

  I wondered suddenly if these two could have had anything to do with that dreadful blow on the back of Macrae’s head or the frightening of him and me at the Hag’s Head. I said, “You must have just missed him. Have you been on the road long?”

  Patrick was surprised at what he conceived to be my change of subject.

  “I caught up with Jassy Macrae some minutes ago as she was crossing the heath.”

  “Looking for Macrae, so I was!” she said angrily. “And much good it’s done. Half a day’s custom at the Owl lost. He’s drunk over in Heatherton, like as not.”

  “No, I’m afraid he isn’t,” I said, trying to be as calm as she was angry. “I suspect it was Mr. Macrae I watched die of a broken skull in the Hag’s Head today. I was just going for help.”

  “God in heaven!” cried his wife, and clapped her hand over her mouth. Her ripe beauty seemed to crumble behind the latticework of her fingers, and I saw that she was as old as Patrick or Sir Nicholas, but so beautifully “boned” that one would suspect her to be a woman in her early twenties. Whether she had loved her husband or hated him, one couldn’t tell, but she was not indifferent. I began to suspect that any relationship between her and Patrick was very likely his doing.

  At any rate, he moved rapidly now to take my hand and help me into the gig with Timmy in my other arm.

  “There’s a quicker path a little to the north,” he said.

  I objected. “Would it not be better to go to the village first, to bring ... whatever is needed?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Oh, yes! I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, then?”

  I had no argument against such nonchalance. I myself was still as badly shaken as was little Timothy, whom I held against my bosom, a warm, soft, confused little bundle. But of course we had seen Macrae die in that dreadful way; and perhaps even more intensely disturbing, we had witnessed the peculiar phenomenon in the dusty shadows on the landing above the stairs. I knew, of course, now that I had the chance to consider it at a safe distance, that the pale, bodiless face Macrae had mistaken for a “haunt” was merely one of those oddities formed by light and shadow; yet I still could not explain why the face had disappeared as I watched it.

  Despite the nonchalance of Patrick Kelleher, I was relieved to have run upon him and Jassy Macrae; for even though I had been positive the man was dead, I would much prefer that other human beings should make an effort, however futile, to revive him. Whatever the seriousness of Macrae’s head injury, I was convinced that the thing that had precipitated his death was the sight of the pallid, imaginary face staring down at him from the stairs. Imaginary it was, but deadly, too. I felt that if I could persuade someone to examine the inn from attics to cellars with me, we would exorcize those legends and make nonsense of such phantom faces; but I confess that after Macrae’s cries of “the haunt!” I lacked the courage to explore the Hag’s Head alone.

  “How did Macrae break his skull?” asked Patrick as he guided the horse and the rackety, over-crowded gig off into a road that was hardly wider than a sheep track. I glanced at Mrs. Macrae, but she was holding tight to the side of the gig, biting her lips and gazing silently into the vast moorland distances.

  “I think he fell down the stairs at Hag’s Head,” I said. “When I met him out on the heath, he murmured that he had fallen and asked if I would get him to the inn. Since we were within sight of the Hag’s Head, I thought—”

  Patrick shook his head.

  “I’m afraid he meant his own and Jassy’s place, the Owl of York.”

  Yes. I knew that now. And I knew too that if I could somehow have got the poor man back to the village, or even left him in a sheltered place on the heath, his life might have been saved. But death had been upon him from the moment he entered the Hag’s Head. Thinking aloud, I repeated this truth and became belatedly aware of how it disturbed my companions.

  “You’ll not be telling us he saw the Hag?” Patrick asked, looking less amused. His hands tightened upon the reins in a fashion that, to me, betrayed some strong emotion, perhaps apprehension or even fear.

  “Pat!” said Jassy in a low, disturbed voice. “Don’t conjure! Don’t conjure!”

  I knew what she meant. Until I said it aloud, I did not guess that these two reasonably intelligent village people shared poor Macrae’s fear of “the Hag.”

  “I saw it myself,” I said, hoping for some sort of reasonable explanation.

  “Aye!” said the woman bitterly. “She’s done for him at last, the evil one—the Hag!”

  “What did it look like to you, Kate, this thing you say you saw?” Patrick asked me, without any of the teasing, laughing quality that normally made his voice light and pleasant to hear.

  “Very like an old crone’s face,” I said, seeing that ghastly
“haunt” more vividly in my mind’s eye than it had seemed to me at the deserted inn. I don’t believe I had quite comprehended the enormity of the happening at that time.

  Patrick pursued this phantom picture. “Almost mask-like in its pallor, with a kind of oddness, as though you’d be thinking it’s that thin, you could see through it.”

  “Just so,” I agreed, feeling a chill at the thought, despite the warmth of my coat.

  “Do not, ma’am. I beg you!” Mrs. Macrae cut in sharply in an anguished voice. “It sounds that real I can see its very face.”

  So could I, and since we felt this common reluctance to discuss the ghostly face, it was Patrick who had to probe for explanations.

  “I daresay it’s how the place got its name. The old dragon, Megan’s mother, bought it at a good price, partly because of the legends and partly because she’s a sharp one. Megan claimed to have seen the Hag’s face once. But the business of the flickering lights and the ghosts that are forever being seen by visitors to the moor ... Well and all, that’s since our time.”

  Ever since Mrs. Sedley had condemned the Irishman out of hand for his part in the death of his wife, I had wondered what his side of the story was. I was quite sure his version would differ notably from that of the justice of the peace, Sir Nicholas Everett. As the gig bumped over stray roots and blackened heather, I saw that we were starting up the incline to the Hag’s Head and its outbuildings. My own nerves were none too good, but I could not help noticing how stiff and tight Jassy Macrae sat beside me. I felt that she either cared more for her husband than anyone suspected, or she was in mortal terror of something. I could well appreciate either of her emotions.

  Before the gig had rattled to a stop, Jassy Macrae swung over the side and leaped to the ground. She ran across the desolate garden, her petticoats fluttering and her hair flying in bright red streamers behind her. I hoped this panic was born of concern for the poor dead man, but I had one of those odd feminine intuitions that told me she was concerned with something other than the loss of her husband. What that concern might be I could not imagine. But when Patrick lifted me down and we followed her across the threshold of the Hag’s Head, I saw with feelings of revulsion that I had been right.

  We found her kneeling beside the bundle of mud and wine-stained rags that was Macrae just as I had laid him out in the taproom half an hour earlier. But she was neither praying nor pillowing his battered head nor examining him for wounds. She was certainly examining him, however. She ran her hands over and through each of his garments, appearing more and more dissatisfied as her skillful long fingers came away without having found whatever it was she searched for.

  “You’re a cool one, Jassy,” Patrick commended her with what I hoped was deep irony. He looked around, studying various parts of the ground floor, reliving old memories, as I thought, memories of the life he had lived here with Megan Sedley. I wondered, did he think of the way he had left her here to die? Or perhaps he had been away from the inn when it happened. Was it Mrs. Sedley or Sir Nicholas who had suggested to me that Patrick was off awaiting another woman when he allowed his wife to die? In that case, perhaps someone had wished Megan Kelleher to die.

  Watching him and speculating on his part in her tragic death, or perhaps his lack of part in any attempt at her rescue, I remembered that he and Jassy had been out on the moors separately today by their own admission. Jassy’s reactions had been so strong, though not for humanitarian reasons, that I eliminated her from my rising suspicions. She had certainly been surprised at her husband’s death. But Patrick had been in this region also at the very moment Macrae and little Timmy and I were being terrorized in this house. Separately or together, Patrick and Jassy Macrae must also have been in the region when Macrae was injured. From Macrae’s first words to me on the heath, I supposed his fall down the stairs had happened because he was startled by the strange apparition of the “Hag,” the phenomenon of light and shadow and cobwebs that later caused his death. But was it possible that some human agency had caused that hag’s face to appear?

  “What do you think of the place, Kate? Is it worth your purchase?”

  I ignored his familiar use of my childhood name, on the theory that he very probably would address Queen Charlotte by the name “Charley” if he were admitted to Her Majesty’s presence. I was about to make some equivocal reply when Jassy Macrae rose from her husband’s body, extremely conscious of Patrick’s question.

  “You’re making purchase, ma’am? When is it to be?”

  I had the word “never” upon my tongue, when I bethought myself of those earlier suspicions and looked around the taproom and the lower floor before replying calmly, “I’ve not decided quite when. But soon, I should think. An excellent bargain; don’t you agree, Mr. Kelleher?”

  Patrick walked over to Macrae’s body and made an attempt to lift the man but was forcibly stopped by Jassy Macrae, who launched a tirade that staggered me by its vehemence.

  “You’ll not touch him, Pat! I know what you’re about, selling the place out in such a fashion, and to an outlander! It’s all of a piece with the rest. It’s to keep me out. You’re not satisfied now you’ve got my Macrae stopped. What’s next in this place of horror?”

  None of this made any intelligence to me except to restore my suspicions—first of Jassy, then of Patrick—but precisely what these suspicions were I did not yet know.

  Patrick watched her in a fashion that would have done credit to Timothy pursuing a mouse. “My girl, shall I conjure up the Hag’s face for you? Is that why you’ve such a touching devotion to my dear old home?”

  Instinctively, both Mrs. Macrae and I glanced up at the staircase, but the clouded sun in the wide Yorkshire sky outside the front door was now overhead and no longer cast those suggestive beams into the cobwebs. I was tremendously relieved to see nothing more horrifying than the dusty staircase. I could observe Jassy Macrae’s similar relief, but I had not the least notion why she should resent my possible purchase of the Hag’s Head.

  I offered to help Patrick remove Macrae’s body to the gig, and we managed it between us, with the strangely reluctant assistance of Mrs. Macrae, who located a moth-eaten blanket left by some trespassers in the common room at a time past and wrapped the body with it. The mare kicked up and nearly overturned the gig, but Jassy and I soothed her down, and by the time Patrick had settled the wrapped body securely in the gig, the mare was subdued, if not enthusiastic.

  It was not the mare but Jassy with whom we had the most difficulty. Patrick said, “Take the reins, Jassy. There’ll barely be room for you and—” He broke off, adding with a glance at me, “Kate and I will cut cross the moor by a footpath.”

  “Now, that you will not!” cried Jassy. “You take the gig and young Miss and Macrae. It’s me that walks.”

  I could not understand this disgusting anxiety to avoid her responsibilities, nor could I understand a certain watchful waiting on the part of Patrick Kelleher. For some strange reason he was deliberately taunting Jassy.

  “Get in!” he said, his voice softer, frighteningly sweet. It gave me chills and brought Timothy scuttling out from under the wheels of the gig. I called to the little cat so sharply that he heeled to attention, and I picked him up around his middle so that he dangled limply over both sides of my hand. I watched Jassy Macrae climb up into the gig with an assisting boost from Patrick. She looked down at us before giving the mare a tug on the reins.

  “I know why Macrae was in the Hag’s Head,” she said with tightly leashed anger.

  “And I know,” Patrick repeated, ever so sweetly. “Go along.”

  She rode off. Until the gig and the mare were at the foot of the incline we could hear the rattle of wheels. Then there was no sound but the purring of Timmy close to me and, further off, the stiff, moaning wind as it swept across the great open heath.

  Meanwhile, I glanced around the interior of the inn, feeling that someone ought to straighten things around. Also, no matter how wracking the tho
ught was to the nerves, someone, not to say myself, should walk calmly through every room of the inn, throwing wide the shutters and opening all windows, and thus forever stopping these wicked, anti-Christian apparitions of ghosts and old crones’ faces. Perhaps my intent showed upon my face. I already suspected that Patrick did not look with delight upon the prospect of my purchasing the Hag’s Head, and I was beginning to wonder what secrets the old place harbored that made so many persons violently antagonistic when the matter of its purchase arose. Nothing less than a cache of rubies warranted such strong feelings!

  “Kate, lass, you are beginning to have a buyer’s eye to all the details of my onetime home,” Patrick observed teasingly, but I had a feeling that he was more serious than he sounded. “You know, of course, that it was impossible to heat, and one could not walk without the crack and the creak of every accursed board in the house.”

  “I thought the floors were of York stone,” I reminded him with a pleasant little smile, but my mind was working furiously on this odd effort of his to talk me out of any plan to purchase. Since I had never seriously contemplated a purchase, this seemed doubly amusing and also, in an odd, contradictory way, made me slightly more interested in owning the old place.

  “Ah, well, of course.” He shrugged. “If you will defy the Hag, my lass, that’ll be your concern.” He looked out at the sky, while I saw suddenly the drying stain on the taproom floor, an odd color, not like blood at all, but rusty and pale. Poor Macrae! Did no one shed a tear for the fellow? From the brief contact I had had with him, I thought him a rather likeable man—a drinker, true, but one expected such moorland men to drink. Theirs was not an easy, sedentary life.

  “Now, I wonder what your interest might be,” Patrick pursued the matter, with that same odd persistence. “Can it be that you intend to settle yourself to live in this forsaken old wreck?”

  “Quite!” I said, more pleasantly than before. I think, perhaps, he guessed that I was being heavily ironic, and it did not become me. Even I recognized that. “Shall we be on our way?” I asked, more like myself.