by Jane Harris
I had not took but two steps when who accosted me but Hector. Into my path he jumped and began to dance at me, trotting this way and that like a pony with the head staggers. Over his shoulder I noticed master James on the platform, still talking to the wee woman in the blue shawl.
‘Whell now,’ says Hector. ‘Hif it’s not Miss Hoity-Toity.’
‘Flip away off,’ I says, trying to elbow past him. ‘Or I’ll ottomise you.’
Hector grabbed my shoulder and held me at arms length. He looked offended.
‘Now fwhat’s the matter fwhith you?’ he says. ‘Come on now! I greased the way in there hallready. Fwhun minute your thingumbob is biting your arse for it, the next you fwhant to be left halone.’
(And you can be sure he did not say ‘thingumbob’).
He pinched my waist and tried to get his arms round me. But I twisted out his grasp and turned to face him.
‘All right, mundungus,’ I says, as if I didn’t care. ‘But you have to pay for it.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ says Hector.
‘And it’s 5 shillings.’
At this, he looked as though his hat might blow off with astonishment.
‘Fife shillings! ’
‘That’s right,’ I says. And while he was still chewing on that morsel, I jerked my thumb towards the platform. ‘Who’s your wee woman talking to master James?’
‘Eh?’ He glanced over, his mouth hanging open. ‘Och that’s Missus Bell,’ he says. ‘She’s the fwhun that seen Missus Reid hit the minister. Fife shillings? Are you haffing a choke fwhith me?’
‘That’s what it costs,’ I says. ‘From now on. So think about it. You better start saving up so. Either that or away and fetch mettle.’
And I left him scratching his head and staring after me, betwattled.
I was in one of the last search parties to be formed so I was and thank God Hector was put in another. We were about twelve of us in our group and our task was to walk in line around the perimeter of the trees, beginning at the Free Gardeners Lodge and then heading east and then south and so on, clockwise through the fields and around the woods until we returned to the village. It was thought that missus had been hiding somewhere in the trees but that the noise of the search parties crashing about in the undergrowth might have flushed her out like a gamebird. We took a few lamps and torches against the fog. Alasdair had tellt us to keep at an even distance from each other, with the stretch of two arms or thereabouts between each pair. The party was mostly made up of weavers and some wives and a couple of mop-squeezes like myself. The only folk I recognised were the two miners that I’d seen in The Gushet but since they had never noticed me hiding behind the door I kept my trap shut.
The women on either side of me lived right by the Cross and by Jove they could talk to beat Banagher, so they could. They were more than happy to tell me about all what I had missed during the day. I was very curious about what Mrs Bell had seen from her window. Apparently she’d heard missus getting on at the minister. This was the part I was interested in. Getting on at him about what? I wanted to know, but even though they both had tongue enough for two sets of teeth neither of the women could tell me. They were most impressed to hear that I worked at Castle Haivers but I didn’t want them asking too many questions so I tellt them I was a farm servant and had never seen Mrs Reid except at a distance. If only they knew!
After a while the talk died out and we paced the fields in watchful silence. Sometimes in places where the fog was thinner, the odd light became visible, flickering among the mist and trees, where other search parties were looking. Sometimes we heard a voice call out, or a sudden burst of laughter. And once, my heart went sideways when a shadow bolted across our path, but it was only a deer, with a skitter of hooves and her white tail bobbing until it was swallowed by the mist. I wondered what would have happened had it been missus. Would somebody have given chase and brought her crashing to the ground? I didn’t like to think of her being hunted down like an animal. But neither did I want her to freeze to death under a bush. I imagined her huddled somewhere, or perhaps fleeing ahead of her pursuers, darting wild-eyed from tree to tree. The thought of her in distress made me want to boke.
It took about an hour and a ½ to walk the circuit of the woods. By the time we straggled back to the Cross, it was getting on for twilight. A great bonfire had been lit at the side of the road and somebody had strung up lanterns on the fountain. A few of the search parties had already returned and were taking a break before being sent out again in another direction. Some people were drifting off towards their homes, I wasn’t sure they would be back. It was a cold day, after all, to be traipsing the countryside. Those that were left had congregated around the fire.
A group of old women were doling out tea from a big pot that they had brought from one of the houses. I wasn’t thirsty but I took a jar to warm my hands. Then I went over to the bonfire. Alasdair was stood a little way off, by the fountain, talking to Hector and Biscuit Meek. There was no sign of master James at first but as I peered about me this way and that, I seen his horse emerge from the direction of the trees. He cantered up to his men and jumped down to talk to them. Presumably he’d been riding between search parties to see if anything had been found.
Just then, I near leapt out my skin as an armful of wood landed with a clatter on the flames beside me. I glanced round and seen that it had been thrown by the wee woman in the blue shawl that I’d noticed earlier talking to master James. Dear sake, she was that small if you put a pigeon on her shoulder it could have picked a pea out her arse.
‘Mrs Bell?’ I says.
She smiled up at me. Her face was plump like a belter of a scone, with her eyes dark and small as currants.
I says, ‘It was my missus you seen earlier, with the minister.’
‘Oh dear,’ she says and gave me a look like she felt sorry for me. It made me want to defend missus.
‘Normally she wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ I explained. ‘Not in the usual way of things. Only she’s not been well of late, with her nerves.’
Mrs Bell nodded and patted my arm.
I went on, encouraged. ‘Somebody says she was shouting at the minister. Did you hear what she said?’
Mrs Bell frowned. ‘Well aye,’ she says. ‘Afore she hit him she wanted to know where somebody was. Some woman. Where is she? she kept saying. Where is she? ’
Now by this did missus mean Nora, I wondered? Or the imaginary Mrs Gilfillan? And did it mean that she had mistook Reverend Pollock for the henchman MacDonald or whatever his name was, the supposed master of disguise?
Mrs Bell went on. ‘And then she started warning him to keep his hands aff somebody. You can’t have her, she kept saying. You can’t have her. She was demented, poor dear.’
‘What else did she say?’
‘It was mostly calling him names. Did she huv a temper, your missus?’
‘Not really.’
‘She kept saying something was all his fault. He should never have done it, she says. She wasnae in her right senses, dear. It was getting a bit confused by that point. And all his wee leaflets had fell oot his pocket, poor man, and they were lying scattered aboot the place. He looked like he was trying to pick them up.’
Him and his scutting tracts. Only a fool would be taken in by all that nonsense. I thought of Nora, her box and the many tracts in there. I could just see her all prim and proper, sat in her room, reading them by candlelight. And then in a flash, I remembered the day I had bumped into the Old Bollix in Bathgate and the invitation he made me, to visit him. For—what had he called it—tract elucidation? The old sly boots, he did not fool me for a second. But he might have fooled Nora. All those notes in the margins of her tracts—what was that but elucidation?
Of a sudden, I was convinced that she must have got the tracts from Pollock and had been to visit him—more than once, given the amount of tracts in her box. And then I thought back to what Muriel had said about the Reverend and ‘Wandering Hand Trouble
’. He was such an arsepiece the very thought of it turned my stomach. But right enough, he was a handsome man for his age. And those tub-thumpers can be persuasive. If he had got Nora alone in a room, over the course of a few weeks, who could say what might not have happened? The poor girl. She might even have been stupid enough to fall in love with him.
All at once, I thought I knew the secret behind Noras death. Everything made sense now, why missus had attacked Reverend Pollock, even why she had went mad with grief.
I glanced around to see if master James was still there. I wanted to tell him what I thought right away, for if the truth came out it might help missus get better. To my relief, I seen that he was still standing with Alasdair beside the fountain.
I was about to head over and speak to him when a man came running down Main Street, from the Glasgow direction. A young man he was, dressed in working clothes, in a jacket but no overcoat. He clutched his hat in his hand, perhaps because it would have fell off his head as he ran. A few folk looked at him as he passed but nobody paid much heed at first because any news about missus was expected to come from the woods.
When he seen master James he started yelling. ‘Mr Reid! Mr Reid! They’ve found her!’
And then everybody turned to watch him, as he ran up to the group of men by the fountain and blurted out a few more words, pointing over the rooftops of the village, not to where he had come from exactly, but more towards the north-west.
Mrs Bell touched my arm. ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked me.
‘Shh!’ I tellt her. ‘I can’t hear.’
But something was wrong. Master James was stood stock-still, his face turning pale and stricken as he listened to the man. I seen Alasdair put a hand on his shoulder, as if to give him courage. Then of a sudden a few of the men in the group began pelting down West Main Street. Another leapt up on a cart and grabbed the reins. The doctor jumped up on his trap. Panic had broke out. People started running, mostly in the same direction, down the Great Road. A few others headed up towards the Station. Master James stood in the centre of it all, like a statue. It was only when McGregor-Robertson leaned down and spoke to him that he seemed to will himself into action. He swung up beside the doctor and then the trap sped away up Station road.
I shouted to one of the men as he raced past us. ‘What’s happened? Where is she?’
The man stopped running and turned back. ‘They found her body up on the railway line! She was hit by a train!’
So help me God, I believe I may have laughed out loud. But it was a short laugh, and one that came from shock. I know that now, having since seen the same thing happen a few times. The laughter died on my lips, and still I could not make sense of his words. They echoed inside my head but they had no meaning. Train. Railway line. Body. This last, in particular, confused me. Mr Levy, curled up on the Turkey carpet, cold and still. That was a body. Or Nora, lying in her eternity box. Body.
It was not a word I could associate with missus.
Hail Mary Holy Mary save me.
The man was looking at me askance, he had mistook my laugh for a hardness of heart. ‘It’s not funny,’ he says, turning away. ‘The woman’s dead.’
And then he broke into a run and sped away from us, until the fog and darkness closed around him.
As I sit here now writing this account, I am trying to remember what I was thinking in the seconds and minutes that followed. But there was no thought. Only absence of thought and a bedlam of activity all around me. Everybody was going somewhere at speed. Those that had horses were jumping on them and riding off towards the railway line, taking either the Station road or heading down Main Street. Those that didn’t were running in the same directions. A few people had grabbed whatever vehicles were available and everywhere you looked were carts and traps over-laden with passengers.
The moving figures and horses became a blur. I thought I might pass out and then I realised that Mrs Bell was holding me up. It was my one small piece of good fortune that I had her beside me. She had not been offended by my outburst of laughter, having seen that it came from shock. Now, she was supporting me. I tried to concentrate on her grasp, I got it into my head that it might stop me swooning if I fixed my thoughts on some physical feeling. So hard did I concentrate that the rest of me seemed to disappear. All that was left was the band of flesh midway up my arm, encircled by Mrs Bells fingers. The rest of my body was gone. I became aware that she was taking this band of flesh across the street towards the Swan. There was a dogcart emerging from the yard, driven by old AP Bastard himself. Mrs Bell spoke to him and then she took the band of flesh and handed it up onto the bench after which she climbed up herself.
As soon as the dogcart jolted into motion, I was jerked back into my body, for the rattle and shake of the vehicle went through my arse-bones and up my spine into my skull where it made my teeth chatter. It felt as though the springs of the cart were shot, although I don’t believe they were, it was just that in the absence of thought I seemed to be experiencing every sensation more intensively. As we turned up the Station road and picked up speed, the vibrations grew worse, I was bounced around like a footmans diddle until every part of my body quivered and trembled. I could practically feel my bones separating from my flesh. The flesh falling off, like cold silk ribbons. I was being shaken apart, I was dissolving, I was melting in fact, my mouth filling up with saliva. I was becoming vapour, my breath shooting out in steamy gasps as though I had been running. And yet I was seated, or at least seated as much as the jumping and slithering of the rig across the frozen mud would allow. The air smelled of smoke and soot. Cold, ragged curtains of fog whipped towards us as Henderson drove the horses harder, flailing the whip, and urging them on with yells, and as we approached the slope up to the railway bridge it felt to me as though we were rattling towards the very gates of Hell.
Here at the bridge Henderson slowed the horses for there was a line of vehicles waiting to turn. The road carried on to the north. Down to the right lay the station. To the left was a rough lane that ran in more or less the same direction as the railway track for about two miles before it ended at another road bridge—from where, if you turned south and carried on across country you would eventually reach Castle Haivers. Every vehicle was heading down this lane and we followed. Once the horses got around the turn they picked up speed and on we went, past various people that were racing along on foot. To one side of us lay the railway track, sometimes gleaming, close enough to touch. At other times, the ground sloped away sharply as the line went through a cutting.
A little way ahead, a few carts and traps had pulled up on the grass beside the lane. There were horses tethered to the trees and a group of folk stood at the edge of a steep cutting, while others were leaving their gigs and carts and running to join them. A moment later, we reached the same spot. Henderson brought the horses to a stop. I helped Mrs Bell to the ground and then hurried over towards where the crowd had gathered.
From the edge of the slope you could see down onto the railway line. A group of four men in working clothes were stood beside the track. They didn’t look very happy. On the ground next to them lay a shape or form, it had been covered by empty potato sacks. Another similar form, also covered by sacks, lay a few yards distant, further along the track. Sammy Sums stood a little way off, counting the sack-covered forms, pointing at one then the other. One, two, he went. One, two. One, two.
Master James and the doctor were beetling down the grassy bank and when they reached the bottom, they went over to the men. A few words were spoken. Mrs Bell appeared beside me and took hold of my arm but before I knew it I found myself breaking free from her and scrabbling downhill.
Just as I reached level ground, one of the labourers bent down and raised a corner of the sacks. Master James, his face full of trepidation, leaned down to see what lay beneath. A moment later, the trepidation changed to amazement. After which I heard him say, ‘That is not her. That is not my wife.’
Relief shot through me,
it was like a knock of gin on an empty gut. I stepped closer, to look for myself, just to be sure, and saw that master James was exactly right. For the person laying dead by the tracks was not missus. It was Bridget. It was my mother.
She was on her back, her eyes closed. She looked tiny, like a child. There appeared to be not a mark on her. Her hair, her face, the little that I could see of her clothes—everything perfect. It was as if she would open her eyes at any moment and stretch her arms and start talking. Only, there was something not quite right. At first, I couldn’t work out what it was. The doctor was crouching down to have a closer look at her while master James had turned away. Beyond him lay the other pile of sacks. They had definitely been used to cover something up. Two corpses! Could this other be missus? Sammy Sums was still counting. One, two. One, two. For a moment, I could not make sense of what I was seeing. Why did they not show master James the other corpse? And then, with a sickening jolt, I realised my mistake and why my mother had looked so small. It was not a 2nd body that lay beneath the other sacks. Not a 2nd body at all.
I doubled over and boked and carried on boking until I boked only air. And as I knelt there, heaving into the dirt and stones at the side of the tracks, the mens voices came to me as if from a great distance.
‘We were jist walking home alang this way,’ says one of the labourers. ‘And we seen her lying there. And then—we found the rest ae her, over there.’
I lifted my head and saw him pointing to the other pile of sacks.
‘Cut right in two,’ says the doctor. ‘Dear God.’
‘Aye, she was probably walking along the line, like we were. Except she couldn’t have seen the train because ae the fog. And she was drunk. You can smell drink on her.’