The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  ‘You must be careful, my birds. You’ve come at a bad time, and no mistake. The woods are troubled.’

  ‘The bottles, the stones on the doors,’ I said, ‘they’re protecting you from the woods?’

  ‘Oh no. The bottles and the hag stones are to keep away them furriners on the other side. There’s nothing to keep the woods from what they’re wont to do.’

  ‘Which is?’ Anna said.

  ‘Ah, you’ll see, you’ll see. Or if you won’t …’

  She took a step towards me and the wind was all at once whirling past me and the river was crashing its way closer.

  ‘… I think this one will.’

  And then so soft I thought she must be speaking only inside my head, her voice like embers sifting the last of their warmth …

  You feel it already, don’t you, my bird? Feel how they’ve been peaceful, so peaceful for so long. And now they’re wakened. It’s hate does that, brings the strangeness to the woods again.

  ‘Whose hatred?’ I managed to whisper.

  But the embers were ash, were gone.

  It was Anna’s voice brought me back to the path and the mud and the wretched trees.

  ‘Come on, Shilly, while we’ve the last of the light.’

  The door to the cottage was closed.

  SIX

  We went on as Mrs Haskell had told us. Each cottage we passed had piss bottles before the doors and windows, and hag stones on the doors themselves. There being no one about gave an uncommon feeling to the place. A brooding, a waiting. Or maybe that was the woods, the strangeness Mrs Haskell had told me of. Brought by hate.

  ‘What did Mrs Haskell mean when she called the women furriners?’ Anna said.

  The word sounded so odd in Anna’s mouth, her trying to speak like someone from my part of the world.

  ‘That the women don’t belong here,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. She meant foreigners.’

  ‘That’s what Mrs Haskell said.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, I suppose she did. Oh!’

  Anna fell. A root snaking for her, I thought, then saw she’d tripped over a spade. The one the boy had dropped. I helped her up.

  ‘Perhaps Peter thinks his brother might be in a tunnel, like you do,’ I said.

  ‘But he told his grandmother he’d been in the water. Why would anyone dig in a river?’

  ‘The woods, maybe – sending everyone mad.’

  Anna leant the spade against the wall of the last cottage and then we were once more walking beneath branches.

  ‘Don’t get caught up in that nonsense, Shilly, or you’ll be no help with this case. These trees are simply plants. Plants!’

  She slapped her palm against a trunk. Far above us, the leaves shook and then there was flapping as unseen birds took to the air.

  On Anna went, talking loudly of the ordinariness of oaks and ash and thorn trees, which I knew weren’t ordinary at all.

  We were deep inside the woods now and the path had grown narrower, less well-trodden. Anna kept on with purpose but I had my doubts.

  ‘How will we find our way out again?’ I said, and ripped my skirt free of a bramble’s clutching fingers.

  ‘Landmarks, Shilly. We’ll soon grow acquainted with them and be as familiar with these woods as Mrs Haskell.’

  That lowered my spirits even worse. I didn’t want to know the place. I wanted to leave.

  ‘Here’s one such landmark now,’ Anna said. ‘The fallen oak.’

  ‘Markers are no use if they shift about.’

  Anna laughed. ‘This oak hasn’t moved since it hit the ground, Shilly. Look at the ferns that have grown over it. And the moss here.’ She rootled in the green. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if this is a badger’s sett beneath. A big one too.’ She stood and clapped the earth from her hands. ‘There’s nothing here to be afraid of, though these strangers, whomever they are, whether they’ve taken the boy or not, they’ve done an excellent job of terrifying the inhabitants of Trethevy, both rich and poor.’

  She took pity on my terror and squeezed my arm.

  ‘Anna …’

  She reached for my face and I closed my eyes, ready to feel her touch again, but it was not as I wanted for she was rootling in my hair as she had rootled beneath the fallen oak.

  ‘How have you ended up such a mess when we’ve walked the same path?’ she said, pulling twigs and leaves from my hair as if it was a nest she was unmaking.

  ‘We walk in different ways,’ I said.

  ‘That I won’t argue with.’ She tossed the twiggy bits into the brambles and walked on. ‘Mrs Haskell said to go left here, didn’t she?’

  The path was now so narrow we had to walk one behind the other, and the noise of the river grew louder with each step and kept us from talking, and that was fine by me for Anna wasn’t listening anyway. We twisted and turned, and then something jutted from the trees. A wall. Tall but not wide, snaked with thorns and leaning over the path as if it strained against the thorns’ clutches. This was the remains of the monks, then, and here the path forked. We bore left. A few steps further and we came to the river, just as Mrs Haskell had said we would.

  By then it was too dark to see well but the noise told me the river was wide and fast-moving, and I was glad we didn’t have to cross it to reach the summer house. Glad, too, that the women were on the other side.

  The path became steep, then stepped, and the way much wetter, being so close to the river. That made our going slow. We were climbing and with every step the river became louder still, so I knew the waterfall must be close and the summer house beside it. But still I feared we’d never find the place, that the woods had closed over it as they had the monks’ wall, its timbers softened into the wet earth. Sunk. Lost.

  ‘There it is!’ Anna said.

  I looked up. It was a little white house with wooden slats, painted black, laid over the top. The white paint was bright in the gloom of the woods and of evening.

  Anna gave me her hand and hauled me the last of the way, but then I saw there was still further to go, one more set of steps to climb, for the summer house had been built onto a crag of rock. Anna unlocked the door with the key Mrs Carne had given us and then I fair tumbled inside, tired and aching. But I found a scrap of strength from somewhere and shoved the door closed, locked it tight on Anna and me. The woods would be kept out if it was the last thing I did.

  I couldn’t keep out the water. The damp had crept up the walls, a foot high near the fireplace. I poked at the green fur with my boot.

  ‘Hardly a surprise when one builds on a riverbank,’ Anna said, dropping the blankets she’d carried. ‘Still, I suppose the view must be worth it.’ She went to the large window that faced the river. ‘Not much to see but shadows now. Come the morning we might have a sight worth sketching.’

  ‘Can you draw?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a line. And unless you’ve been hiding your artistic light under a bushel, I’m guessing neither can you, Shilly.’

  ‘Never tried,’ I said. ‘Surely you must draw the patterns for the clothes you make?’

  ‘That doesn’t count.’ She bent to look in the fireplace. ‘Only cobwebs here.’

  ‘Why don’t the patterns count?’

  ‘Because they’re easy.’

  ‘Only if you know how to do them. Like … like reading, and being able to write.’ I gripped the back of a chair. The cloth was clammy. ‘Will you teach me?’

  After a pause, she said, ‘I will.’

  I was so pleased I almost forgot how to breathe.

  ‘On one condition. You must keep from the drink.’

  ‘I am, I haven’t …’

  ‘I know. But it’s the sticking with it that’s the hardest part. Having something to work for, to motivate you – that’s what’ll keep you from the bottle.’ She was going to the door. ‘If not a drop of alcohol passes your lips during our time in the woods then I’ll teach you your letters. Now, I’ll fetch something to burn before we succumb to the damp.
’

  ‘Don’t go far!’

  ‘If you could see your way to fashioning some kind of bed.’

  And then she was gone, back out into the woods, leaving me to think about what she’d offered me as I looked round our new home.

  There wasn’t much to see. It was a single square room, filled with almost as many chairs and tables as the room we’d seen in Sir Vivian’s house, but it would be ours until we’d done what was needed with the women across the river. What were they doing in that moment? Settling down for the night as we were? As I cleared the chairs and spread the blankets on the floor, were they pulling back their bedcovers? I went to the window. Across the water a woman might be looking back at me. The strangers in the woods. Which of us was which at that moment? I put my hand to the glass and thought of another hand likewise pressed against a window. Which of us … the witch?

  The door banged open. Anna came in with an armful of branches, sending such thoughts away.

  ‘I found enough for tonight,’ she said, and dropped the branches by the fireplace. ‘These were fallen. We’ll need an axe for gathering more. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m afraid …’

  ‘Not this business of the woods again. It’ll all be better in daylight, I promise you. Something to eat would help. I shouldn’t think Mrs Carne provided us with anything, did she?’

  ‘No. But the squire did.’

  I reached into the pocket of my dress and pulled out a napkinned parcel. Anna took it from me and frowned, but when she opened it, she grinned.

  ‘Shilly, you rogue.’

  She stuffed one of the fancy cakes in her mouth and when she had room to move her tongue again she told me I was wicked to have thieved, then thanked me heartily for doing so. I lit the fire and we ate our spoils before its dancing light. The cakes weren’t so neat as when I’d slipped them from the plate. Some were smashed to pieces, and the cream in the middle had gone greasy from the warmth of being pressed against me. But we licked every last crumb from our fingers and praised the squire’s cook.

  ‘You were quick about it,’ Anna said. ‘I didn’t notice a thing.’

  When she was asleep I crawled to the bag I’d carried from Jamaica Inn that morning. She hadn’t seen me take the bottle either.

  SEVEN

  I couldn’t stay inside to do as I had need to, not after she’d said she’d teach me my letters if I kept from it. Not when my fingers itched to stroke her sleeping face. In the daytime, when she was striding about, wearing her false parts and hiding her yellow-haired self, there was a hardness to her. Her mouth was more often pursed than bearing the sideways smile I knew she had in her keeping. Her brow was furrowed, making her look older, fretful. But when she slept, all that left her. She couldn’t hide the softness that was within her, and at the sight of it I feared even more to let her down.

  I didn’t want to go back into the woods, of course, for they were not to be trusted. But when we’d arrived at the summer house I’d seen a good place. It was a wooden shelf that ran beneath the window and looked over the water, thickly built and wide enough for chairs, but without a rail of any kind so I guessed this part of the summer house was still unfinished. It was a good place to be alone, but if I should roll off, smash drunk-heavy into the water and the rocks below, would Anna care?

  That I didn’t know the answer made me unstop the bottle and take my first swig. It was strong, unwatered stuff they sold at Jamaica Inn and I was unused to it. My eyes burnt and my head sloshed about. The feeling was like before, when Mrs Haskell had spoken inside my head and told me of the hatred in the woods, that I should see this if Anna couldn’t. And hadn’t I seen it already? Something had been shifting about. There was uneasiness in every leaf. To know this, to feel it, even when I didn’t want to – what did that make me?

  This worry made me take my second drink, and my third, and all the others that came after. Would that I was like Anna, able to walk the path and feel nothing more than wonder at a badger’s sett. Would that I was different. Would that I was like I was before Charlotte Dymond had come into my life, for if the pair of women across the river were powerful, as she had been, I didn’t want to be anywhere near them.

  Or be anything like them.

  A bell. A church bell. Calling us to worship. Calling me to stand. But I couldn’t. My legs were twisted under me like matted roots, and like the roots I was beneath the ground and it was wet—

  —save that of the bell that shines like a mirror, that catches the sun and rings and rings, though no hand touches it, and then the ringing becomes cries and the cries become laughing and there are two of them, their hair long and dark and thick as branches. Their backs are to me as they go about their work, their pushing and shoving and laughing and holding him down, the old man, in the pool, him gasping and crying out and—

  —wrenching to get free, this old man, this not-flesh-and-blood man, this sainted man, this saint being drowned in his own holy water, his own holy well they’re killing—

  —ring louder now and I tell them to stop they must stop stop, please stop he’s—

  —them turning to look at me and I see that they are like me, women, looking at me their empty faces—

  —there is no looking for their faces have no eyes their faces—

  —ceases his thrashing but still the pool’s water slops onto the slate and the drips—

  —for it is raining

  I could hear the drips. I feared I’d be soaked, soaked as the old man and that might be the start of it, the drowning and that pair with no eyes but seeing me anyways, coming for me.

  That made me shift myself and I found my face against stone, a wall. I sat up, let the floor and the wall spin until they had spun themselves to stillness. The rain kept on, each drop a thump between my ears. But there was no rain, or none that I could feel. Only the sound, the drip drip drip. I pressed my ear against the wall of the summer house. The water was inside it, and I was on the shelf outside wretched with drink and seeing such terrible things again. For that was what brought such seeing. The drink.

  The drips faded, stopped. I moved along the wall, listened in different places. Nothing.

  I got a grip on my own fearful thrashes, drunk thrashes, and knew the old man to be Saint Nectan that Mrs Haskell had spoken of, and that I’d been shown his holy well. He’d been drowned, was lost. But the Haskell boy that was missing, he could still be saved.

  And I could do the saving.

  EIGHT

  A dull thump. Another. It was a clitter, that noise, and coming from above. I kept my eyes closed and my face tucked into my chest, hoping that whatever torment now visiting me might soon be gone. But the noise only grew louder.

  I managed to roll on to my front but it took longer for my legs to remember how they worked so that I could kneel and look up. The sun glared down on the river, so bright it made water stream from my eyes so bad that if anyone should see me I’d look like I was scritching. And maybe I was scritching. I felt wretched enough. It was the strength of the drink. Or my needing another. I wasn’t sure if there was a difference between those feelings any more.

  The magpies were jouncing around on the summer house roof. That was the cause of the clitter. And then I saw Anna at the other end of the shelf, looking out to the waterfall. Her pipe was clamped in her mouth and I caught the sweet prickle of its burning. She wore no wig, and had no paint on her face. She wasn’t beautiful. She was all angles and scrawny, her nose too long, her lips too thin. But there was something about her true self, her – undisguised. Something I had no words for.

  ‘I might be tempted to try my hand at drawing after all.’ She pointed at the water with her pipe. ‘Quite the picture.’

  The spot where the river broke from its bed, tumbled, and so made the waterfall, was level with the summer house. The air was damp with spray from the water falling, crashing into the pool beneath. I thought the drop fifty feet, maybe more. From the pool the water raced on, rushing to be gone from the wood
s and out to the sea. I would rather have been at the bottom of the sea at that moment, beyond reach of daylight. Such were my thoughts as I tried to collect myself.

  I got to my feet and there was a clunk. The empty bottle rolled and disappeared over the edge of the shelf. A pause, a breath, and then the smash. The magpies took to the air.

  ‘I …’ But I got no further for I had no words. She could see. She knew.

  ‘Today,’ she said, peering at the bowl of her pipe, as if the day might be caught within the sweet tobacco. ‘We’ll start the bargain from today. If from this point until we leave the woods you keep away from the drink, I’ll teach you your lessons.’

  ‘Anna, I—’

  ‘That’s reason to find the boy, find the guilty party and be gone all the more quickly, wouldn’t you say, Shilly?’

  There was something in her voice, something caught between sadness and hopefulness, that made me see, for the first time since I’d known her, that she wanted this for me. Wanted me to be better, to be free of the drink. But after last night, after drinking and seeing the blinded pair drown the saint, I knew the cost of giving it up. The cost for both of us, and I had to tell her that. It was only fair, the bargain we had struck to work together.

  ‘What I can see, what you know I can see, Anna, it’s the drink that shows me. I can’t explain it, but I can’t do without it. Not if you want my help with cases.’

  She threw up her hands and was ready to tell me I was foolish, it was nonsense – all of this we’d done before. I kept on, though. It was the only way.

  ‘Before Charlotte died she gave me a gift. Or a curse. I don’t know yet which it is. It might be both. But understand me, Anna – without the drink, I can’t do it. My part of the deal, our partnership – whatever you want to call it. You have to take me as I am.’