Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  Miss Brigstocke smiled kindly at him, as though she could see his thoughts, and wished him to know that she understood. ‘My plans are not yet settled, Reverend,’ she said. ‘I have been visiting a cousin not far from here, and thought to see the village, which is said to be a charming place. And I find it to be so. Who could not be drawn to it? The little lanes, and such cheerful awnings and everyone going about their right business under thatch and steeples. Now do tell me, is the church, yes, with that rather imposing spire over there, is that Norman?’

  He laughed, and told her no, no, she had it quite wrong … Conversation went on in this fashion, rather pleasantly, he thought, for some minutes, as the merits of the country were extolled, and the decline in English architecture mourned. Her manner was, after all, perfectly pretty; she had not too many firm opinions and showed a charming deference to his views. As they spoke he observed her and was increasingly distressed by what he saw.

  ‘Miss Brigstocke,’ he said, after all the sandwiches had been consumed, ‘I hope you will not mind me presuming a little, but it seems to me that you are not in the best of circumstances. How does this come about? I am sorry to speak so bluntly …’

  She blushed a little, turned away. She said nothing. A tooth worried her lower lip.

  He was determined not to retreat. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘We are old friends, are we not?’

  Miss Brigstocke nodded, eyes lowered and said, ‘I am afraid that my departure from Italy was somewhat precipitous, and I did not have the luxury of looking about me for a good appointment. I took the first one offered, and as perhaps you will know, Mr Comer, if you fall on hard times, hard times follow, for people look only as far as your last post.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, with some warmth, ‘what can befall someone who has no recourse or friends. And Miss Hopewell and yourself … I hope that you and she did not part on bad terms?’

  She raised her eyes to his and said quietly, ‘I will not discuss that, for I do not believe in speaking ill of the dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ There was a rush in him, of some feeling, some old feeling: it was like seeing again, after many years, a place where you once played as a child.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Brigstocke, ‘quite recently. She and her husband both … But of course you may not have known. She married in ’40.’

  ‘I did not. I am glad, although,’ he said with another strong current of sympathy, ‘I think it placed you in a difficult position.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Mary returned to England as a bride. While I … well, sad tales are not for happy occasions, are they?’

  ‘She was never strong,’ the reverend said, thinking of the dark and shadowed cast of Mary Hopewell’s eyes, set deep in her lily-pale face.

  ‘No, I fear not. I thought,’ said Miss Brigstocke delicately. ‘Forgive me, but I thought that at one time, you and she …’ Her eyes filled with soft meaning.

  The reverend thought of that Italian idyll, of the sound of his pony’s hooves, and the sun-drenched hills, and dishes of olives beneath the trees. He recalled the scent of wild herbs, and women hanging white sheets to dry in the hedges on warm starlit evenings. That was before he had met Theresa and married her, and she gave him two strapping sons, whose lusty cries filled his house day and night … he would not change it for anything, of course. But it was good to have the memory of Miss Hopewell’s elegant hand on his, and of the sunshine. What had he called her? Only to himself, mind, but it had been rather poetic in him – a fragile bloom.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the reverend, ‘perhaps there was something of that, once.’ His voice sounded unfamiliar to him; deep, rich and full of feeling. It had a slight tremolo, like an actor speaking. ‘No,’ he went on. ‘She was never strong.’ He thought, Oh, Mary …

  ‘Of course Mary’s death was violent, and so very gruesome,’ said Miss Brigstocke. ‘One cannot blame her health for that.’

  Reverend Comer felt as if she had doused him in water. To be considering something rather pleasurable and melancholy, and then to be so abruptly shocked … There was an uneasy turning in his insides. There was something uncouth in her, after all.

  ‘Perhaps you had better tell me,’ he said. He sounded shrill and cold now, he knew.

  ‘I only know what I have been told,’ Miss Brigstocke said, ‘but I will repeat it. Talking is such a thirsty business, don’t you find?’ She took a macaroon and nibbled it, watching him.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said, starting. He called for more tea.

  Around them the room was emptying – the morning was yielding to luncheon and there were many market-day engagements. The rain had begun. It struck the windows in spiteful pellets. He thought, she will not want to go out in this, with only that grey thing for protection, and saw then that she lent her tale mystery and interest in order to prolong it. He softened. Christian charity settled into him again. He would not oppose her.

  ‘I understand that Mary was very happy,’ said Miss Brigstocke. The steam from the teapot drifted about her face. ‘They had settled in a house in Devon, where her family was from, you know. I have been in the vicinity quite recently, and it is a place of rolling hills and, though quite lonely, quite lovely too. The house is a madman’s dream, of course, old stone and large doors and quite impossible to heat. But the situation is pleasing, in a shallow valley behind a hill, and looking out in all directions on the vista.

  ‘Mary occupied herself quite pleasurably by all accounts with the house and with a school she had begun in the village, and other things. They had brought a manservant from Italy who seemed to rule them with a rod of iron and ordered their household. A peculiar name … Rattles? Quivers? Shakes?

  ‘Some small discords, I think, with neighbours, which is always the case in the country. A man by the name of Gilmore would refuse to keep his cattle off the land, or would not let theirs on his, or something of that sort. I am not very well acquainted with farming practices. And of course presently there was a child, a son, which was given some outlandish name. I do not recall it. This added to their contentment.

  ‘She was in the habit, as the boy grew older, of taking him up onto the moor and staying there for long hours, playing games with him and telling him the names of the plants and so on. Sometimes her husband accompanied her. On many other occasions, it was the manservant. I will call him Quivers – I cannot continue to refer to him as merely the manservant and I cannot for the life of me recall … Everyone thought it odd of Mary to spend so much time with only a child and Quivers for company. But as you may recall Mary was ever one to please only Mary. She would not have cared what appearance it presented. And some days she and the child went out with no escort at all. Her husband showed no inclination to interfere, which is of course quite typical of … But I forget. You did not know him.

  ‘One of these days she went with the child alone to the moors. And she did not come back for lunch, and then not for tea. At around four in the afternoon the day, which had been fine and bright, was abruptly covered with the fog which as you may know in that part of the country descends with no warning. It is like being swaddled in wool. It descended on the house, on the valley, crept in at the door frames and filled the windows with moving cloud.’ Here Miss Brigstocke paused. ‘This holds some particular horror for me,’ she said. ‘I am afraid of the fog. Being in it … is very much how I imagine death – nothing in the world but thick white, and the sound of one’s own footsteps. But this, I suppose, is by the by.

  ‘As the mist rose about the house and there still was no sign of them, concern was changed to fear. Mr Villarca was quite beside himself. It is understandable. Dusk approached, and all the household was assembled with lanterns and torches and turned out to find her. They marched in a long line across the moor, calling her name and holding the lights high. But the air was so dense, the late afternoon almost dark as night. The lamps dimmed and winked on either side as they drifted further and further apart. It would have been very easy to step on a loose stone and fall,
to tread unwary into a bog and sink and never be seen again. Or even to wander too far, and be lost on the endless heath until you perished in the cold and the black. The searchers had begun by fearing for her, you see, but now they began to fear for themselves. They trod carefully and shivered, and called to one another that perhaps they should return to the house. All except Mr Villarca, who ran ahead, heedless, calling his wife’s name in the lowering air. Voices travel so strangely in the mist, have you noticed?

  ‘At length there was heard a great screech from ahead, like stone breaking. Sometimes when razing buildings a great metal ball is used. You know the thing I refer to? It hits the brick and the girders and the glass in the windows with a sound that is not like a crash, not at all. It is a shriek, a grinding shriek. That is what this sound was like. The searchers waved their torches, and stumbled towards the terrible noise, calling all the while. As they crested the rise of Bell Tor they saw below, through the ribboning mist, what looked like a broken spider splayed upon the grass. It was Mr Villarca, holding his wife and his son in his arms. She was insensible, wet through, her cambric dress streaked with mud. The boy was crying, and speaking to his father. Whatever was said, it made Mr Villarca give another of those terrible howls. The servants tried to pry him from Mary for it was plain her arm was broken. At first he only wept and held her, but he had to let her go, because the child was clinging to him, still talking very fast in Spanish. Alonso, that is his name. At least they had the good sense not to name him after his father. Alonso. Poor little boy.

  ‘They put her in a blanket, and carried her as best they could. But as they were approaching the house Mary woke, and the sight of her eyes was enough to freeze the blood. She stared sightless under the flickering lamplight, and would only say, ‘I have seen her.’ Which made little sense, but she had of course received a great shock. Each time she spoke her husband wept. But they all got inside, and the doctor was fetched and the arm splinted, the child calmed and bathed and that should have been the end of it.’

  ‘Villarca,’ said the reverend. ‘Peculiar. Where have I heard—?’

  Miss Brigstocke looked sharply at him, but went on. ‘After that Mary was confined to her bed for some time. She had taken a chill on the moor. But other ailments, less explicable, plagued her also. Her eyes troubled her a great deal. They became very sensitive. She complained that the world was very dim. A veil was over everything. She could not abide daylight, her eyes streamed, she shrank from the gentlest sunshine – but nor could she bear darkness, for then she saw things that were not there. The maids were woken in the early hours of the morning by her weeping and lamenting – that there was mist in the room. She could not see, for all the mist. Once she threw a pitcher at a figure who, she said, stood in the middle of the room, bald and like a worm. She howled for it to take its gaze off her. Its great white face hung over her at night.

  ‘She had a great conviction that a grave had been dug outside her window. She would spend hours looking at the particular spot with her clouded eyes. It was pretty: on a rise, beneath an ancient cedar tree. She said a murdered girl was buried there. It became such a mournful and incessant refrain that her husband had the hill dug up one day. They turned up yards and yards of earth, probed down into the ground, made an absolute mess of it. There was nothing to be found, of course. No unmarked grave, no girl. But still Mary stared at the ravaged hill. Sometimes, she said, she heard the spade turning the earth, heard the corpse fall into the deep hole.

  ‘She began to shun her husband, and her child. There were no more days in the sunshine on the moor. She lay in state with the curtains drawn. Mr Villarca would have taken her away, to some continental rest cure, but Mary would not go. She blamed him in some measure for what had befallen her, for marrying her at all. “Why did you give this to me, not telling me the price?” Her voice was always very carrying.

  ‘And as her sight went so did her reason. She flew into rages, running through the house, white-eyed and blind, breaking china. She wounded herself, hurling herself into walls, and bloodied her head with beating it on doors. She said the child was never to be brought to her, for she might hurt him. Those were the words – she might hurt him. Did Mary mean herself, or …? Anyhow it seemed a wise prohibition, in the circumstances.

  ‘When one day Leopoldo Villarca was not to be found, it was thought by some that he had reached his limits. Men, you know, have their limits, all. It is something I always bear in mind. He was there one evening at the supper table, and he kissed his son good night … the next morning he was gone, and so was a horse from the stable. One may draw one’s own conclusions. And people did, mind you.

  ‘His absence seemed a relief to Mary. She became more docile, in fact, and submitted to seeing a doctor who was very good with eyes, though he said there was little to be done. The cataracts which had formed on them could not be got rid of. She even admitted her son to her room for half an hour, some days. She ate, and strengthened somewhat, and her nights were quiet.

  ‘The bog threw up Mr Villarca’s corpse two miles from the house, in open country. It was a shepherd who saw it. Boots, just boots sticking out of the ground. I daresay he thought he’d got a fine pair of hessians for nothing, until he saw what they were attached to. They are strange, bogs. They will take things down and hold them, preserving them in the dark for oh so long. But something shifts, and up it comes, good as new. And so it did. There was no telling how it had happened but there was one thing … Well.

  ‘They were loath to tell Mary, I think. But she took it well. She shed a tear. Her eyes were like mistletoe berries now, smooth and white. She hoped he was at peace. She told them to take the child out of the house, into the village to his old nurse. He needed to be with other children, she said. And she would be in mourning, which might upset him.

  ‘That night Quivers woke to the scent of smoke drifting through the high halls. When he broke down Mary’s door it was too late, all was done. She was dead on the floor. Flame flickered about in her hair, and had begun to creep up the curtains. They put it out. The room was filled with the haze of smoke, they could scarce see – it was like walking through mist. The poker was in her hand; the tip still glowed red. She had taken her eyes.

  ‘I know that after events such as those I have recounted, it is a common thing for people to say, well, I always thought her queer, or, he was a bad lot – as if one could have seen it coming. So I do not wish to do that. But there was always something strange about them both. They were not people who would live long, grow old and die … I saw it in their faces, during that brief time in Italy. They were both too feeling, too impassioned. They did not understand that one must … anyhow.

  ‘I am not one for repeating gossip but it was said, too, that Mary was overfond of Quivers. That he had detected smoke and reached her chamber very quickly on that fateful night … that he was often in the vicinity of her room.

  ‘And of course, Mr Villarca, when he was found in the bog – I think I did not say – his eyes were gone, as if something had clawed at them until … It might have been anything. Who knows how long he lay in that mire? But yes, it gave people cause to think more, and they thought of Mary. It seemed too much coincidence. Had she taken his eyes too?’

  Reverend Comer rested his back carefully against the chair. ‘Horrible,’ he said. ‘Horrible!’ He felt weak. Such nastiness. It did not belong in this warm room, with the sound of clinking spoons. At length he said, ‘You know a great deal about it, Miss Brigstocke.’

  ‘Why yes. I have only recently come from near Rawblood. The house, you know, which they lived in.’

  The reverend felt an uneasy stirring in his brain. Some headline he had seen in the newspaper, two weeks past …

  ‘I thought it best to gain a thorough picture of what had happened,’ Miss Brigstocke went on. ‘I chanced to be in the area, and in Dartmeet village I fell into conversation quite naturally with the woman who had been the Rawblood cook. And of course there were many others locally wh
o had been a part of it, who had known the Villarcas. I was fortunate enough to come across some of them. The event was so sensational, you know, and so widely talked about; the press cannot be relied upon. But I think I have established the facts.’

  The stirring in Reverend Comer’s brain had become a thunder – a terrible feeling was upon him. He said, ‘Villarca. Mrs Villarca, who was called the Devon Demoness in the Post … Do you mean to say, Miss Brigstocke, that it was Miss Hopewell …’

  ‘Yes, Reverend Comer. That is the vulgar name they gave the case.’

  ‘I had not connected it,’ said the reverend. ‘How could I, how could I know? Her married name …’ His forehead was covered in a light, cold sweat. Both cup and lip trembled as he sipped his tea. Hot drops fell on his waistcoat. Miss Brigstocke regarded him. Her black eyes seemed to him to have grown into two deep and dangerous pools.

  ‘How could you indeed?’ said Miss Brigstocke. ‘I quite see the difficulties.’ She paused for a moment and went on, ‘Yes, I thought perhaps you had not heard the fate of your old friend Mary. So I came to tell you. You would of course wish to know what had become of her.’

  ‘Friend?’ he said. ‘We were barely acquainted …’

  ‘Well, yes, you were! You were there when she first met Don Leopoldo Villarca, that day in Italy,’ said Miss Brigstocke. ‘You have visited his home in fact! You spent a great deal of time with her, and perhaps even made an offer! I would even go so far as to term it an intimate connection.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said the reverend. His eyes darted from place to place, over the mercifully empty teashop.

  ‘I doubt,’ said Miss Brigstocke comfortingly, ‘that any person in this charming village would infer it on their own. Why, you yourself did not. Were it to be pointed out however, I think you would inevitably become the object of much local interest. She being supposed a murderess …

  ‘It is not always comfortable to have old acquaintances from a different time of one’s life constantly about one. Meeting them in the street, passing them in the butcher shop … Sometimes one prefers to let the dog sleep out his night, to let him lie.’