‘We were walking.’ Miss Franks straightened on her box seat.
‘Near here?’ I said.
‘Across the river,’ Miss Franks said.
‘You went to the waterfall?’ Anna asked.
‘The manor house,’ Mathilda said.
Miss Franks stiffened slightly.
‘And what time did you reach the manor house?’ Anna said.
‘At twelve o’clock,’ Mathilda said. ‘I hear the clock chime when the maid, she come running. She chase the cat. It have a bird in its mouth.’
‘A bird’s leg,’ Miss Franks said. ‘A game bird. Expensive.’
Mathilda grinned. ‘The maid shout and cry, and the cat, he just run faster!’
This sounded very much like Pigeon.
‘And when you arrived back here, did you see any sign of Paul Haskell?’ Anna said.
‘No sign,’ Miss Franks said. ‘No rabbit, no bread. We think, Peter and Paul forget to come. Then the parents come. They say we steal Paul, when it is us who have been stolen from.’
‘Things have been taken from here?’ I said.
‘Special things,’ Miss Franks said. ‘Valuable things.’
Mathilda nodded eagerly.
‘Such as?’ Anna said.
‘Silverware – spoons and knives. A frame for a picture. They even take our shoes! So many things – gone. We lock the door and still they get in. Like snakes!’
‘When did these thefts occur?’ Anna said.
Miss Franks shrugged. ‘They go little by little. We do not see until we look. The thieves – they are clever. Take piece at a time. They wait, and when we go out, they come and take, and then they accuse us!’
‘And they listen,’ Mathilda said.
‘Yes!’ Miss Franks hissed. ‘They are spies. All of them. At the windows. They think we do not know they are there but we know. Always we know.’
‘So why do you stay here?’ I said.
‘We cannot leave Trethevy,’ Miss Franks said.
‘Not even for a morning?’ I said. ‘To go to Boscastle and get yourself what you need?’
‘Not for a morning. Not for a month. We must stay.’
‘Surely the ferns aren’t worth all this?’ Anna asked. ‘What is it that truly keeps you here?’
‘That is not a question a stranger can ask.’
‘Well, I hope we won’t be strangers for long.’ Anna picked up the basket.
Miss Franks and Mathilda leant forwards. Their hunger was so bad I felt it had a sound, that the dirty cottage moaned with it.
‘Given the situation you find yourselves in,’ Anna said, lifting out a pasty, ‘I thought you might appreciate—’
Mathilda snatched the pasty.
‘What have you been finding to eat?’ I said.
‘How is it you say?’ Mathilda said through her chomping, her cheeks fat with pastry. ‘The snails.’
The shells by the door. Ordinary things. No malice there, just hunger.
Miss Franks reached to take from Mathilda what remained of the pasty but Mathilda wasn’t having any of that and wriggled away. Then Miss Franks muttered something in their language that made Mathilda hang her head. She let the pasty go. Miss Franks returned it to the basket. I marvelled at her strength in doing so, for she was hungry as Mathilda, I was sure of it.
‘You will forgive Miss Wolffs,’ Miss Franks said. ‘She forgets manners. We will not eat without our guests. I will get the plates.’
She stood but Anna bade her sit again.
‘Please, that’s not necessary. We will leave you to your meal.’
And now relief was clear on Miss Franks’ face at not having to share, but she tucked the relief back inside herself and found her haughtiness again.
‘As you wish, Miss Drake,’ she said, as if she didn’t care either way if we stayed and shared the food. ‘You may call on us again, if it would please you.’
It would please her very much, I thought, if we came with baskets of food each time. I hoped Mrs Haskell wouldn’t learn who was sharing the things we bought from her. She wouldn’t like that much, and I’d enjoyed the welcome of Trethevy. If we could only find Paul, we might be forgiven for feeding witches.
We stood to go. Miss Franks stayed seated, gripping the basket of food. Mathilda followed us to the door and said goodbye, her hand shaking all the while. She’d all but closed the door when she put her face to the gap and whispered, ‘You come again. We must eat. I will starve if she—’
A hurry of footsteps and then the door slammed shut.
‘They’ll be ripping those pasties apart,’ Anna said.
‘We should have a look about, shouldn’t we? They’ll pay us no heed while they’re eating.’
Anna followed me round the cottage, through the tangle of greenery trying to choke the place.
‘Mathilda could just stay here all day for ferns to draw,’ I said.
Anna snorted. ‘I don’t believe they’d endure this much hardship for a few plants. They’re used to having help – that’s clear enough from the pantomime about making tea.’
‘And the poor pinning of their hair. They haven’t much practice at that.’
‘I don’t expect they’ve done much for themselves in life, until now,’ Anna said. ‘They’ve clearly been well off in the past, but what has caused their change of fortune?’
The back of the cottage had one small window. I peered in and saw a bed, no other furniture, but the room was crammed with fiddly things just as the front one had been. No wonder it had taken this pair a little time to notice their belongings had been stolen.
‘If we come again,’ I said, ‘if we bring more food, they might tell us what has befallen them. Mathilda – that’s Miss Wolffs – she’s wanting to talk. Needs to, I should think.’
‘That Miss Franks …’ Anna said. ‘We’d have more luck questioning Peter Haskell’s spade.’
‘She was happy to talk about thieving.’
‘Wasn’t she?’ Anna got hold of the window frame. The sash slid up easy enough. ‘Locking the door seems a futile measure. But I wonder …’
I heard her false teeth tapping, her thinking noise. But I was thinking too and I was ahead of her.
‘You don’t believe them, about the thieving.’
Anna lowered the window back into place. ‘It could be a way to cast themselves as victims rather than villains, to elicit sympathy instead of fear.’
‘To un-witch themselves,’ I said.
‘In a manner of speaking.’
I made my way round the other side of the cottage, so that we should make a circle of it. There weren’t so many ferns and brambles so the way was easier.
‘There isn’t much menace to them, or otherworldliness,’ Anna said, coming up behind me.
‘You mean you don’t believe them to be witches?’
‘Do you?’ she asked.
I turned to face her.
‘Are you asking because you want my answer, Anna, my real answer, or are you mocking me again? And I ask you that because I can’t always be sure, even though you told me we would work as equals.’
‘Well, you can’t deny they’re flesh and blood, Shilly. And that they have eyes. I certainly don’t believe them to be reincarnations of the sisters said to have buried St Nectan in the river.’
‘Or drowned him.’
‘Whichever. Legends aside, do you believe that Miss Wolffs and Miss Franks are engaged in … supernatural practices?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’ve set up home here with a great many possessions but no money, no food, and they won’t say why they’ve come. And Paul is still missing. That’s a fact.’
‘Indeed it is.’
We began walking back to the river, to our part of the woods.
‘So,’ Anna said, ‘the women arrive in Trethevy for a mysterious purpose and then Paul disappears. I cannot believe the two things are unrelated.’
‘Then they’re bound somehow,’ I said. ‘But what’s the
binding?’
‘It must be whatever has brought the women to the woods.’ Anna was all at once sprightly – a plan was coming. ‘To find Paul Haskell we need to learn more about them, and quickly if we’re to find the boy alive. Mathilda said they stayed in Boscastle before they came here. We’ll go there ourselves, ask—’
‘To Boscastle? Oh, I can’t. I can’t, Anna!’
‘Because of Charlotte?’
It was all I could do to nod, sent dumb just thinking of the place my girl was born, had lived before she came into my arms.
Anna took me by the elbow and set me walking again. ‘It won’t be easy, Shilly, I know that. Don’t think me cruel in suggesting it. I could go without you.’
‘And leave me on my own? In this wretched place? I don’t think so, Anna Drake!’
Part of me wondered if she’d come back, if leaving me to go to Boscastle wasn’t the first step in leaving me forever. Charlotte had wanted to leave me. I feared Anna going too.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘That’s settled, then,’ she said. ‘We’ll speak to those who knew Miss Franks and Mathilda in that place, see if we can’t learn their purpose in coming here.’
‘Yes,’ I said, but trembly still.
She held me closer. ‘There’s something you can be certain of when we go to Boscastle, Shilly, and that might be of help to you.’
‘I’d be glad to hear it.’
‘The one person in the world I can guarantee won’t be there is Charlotte Dymond.’
There was truth in that, of a kind, for my girl was in the ground in Davidstow churchyard. Her flesh and bones were, at any rate. The other part of her, terrible and raging, that was on the moor still, but Boscastle wasn’t the moor. It was the sea. And didn’t I have someone else now, someone better, holding me up, holding me close?
But then she, too, was slipping from me, for Anna’s foot had caught something in the ferns and she stumbled, then righted herself and picked it up, this tripping thing. A piece of china, I thought, until Anna told me it was called por-s’lain. I didn’t know about that but I could see it was a little person, like the many others the women had in their cottage.
This person had been broken at the waist and it was the lower half Anna had kicked. A woman, for the bottom of her dress was clear to see. It was pale pink and shaped like a bell. Or a man wearing a dress. Such things were possible, I thought, because Anna dressed as a man, had been Mr Williams when I first met her, so why not the other way around? Gathered at the woman’s feet were several birds. They burst from the por-s’lain, as if trying to fly away.
Anna turned the broken woman this way and that, peering at her. ‘A fine piece. There’s a maker’s mark on the bottom.’
‘Let me see.’ I thought it was letters maybe, but to my eye they were tangled as washing wrung by the wind.
‘The top half – can you see her?’
We kicked aside the leaves and parted the ferns, but there was no trace of the broken woman’s other parts.
‘Miss Franks was telling the truth, then,’ I said, ‘about having things taken.’
Anna stowed the piece of woman in her black bag. ‘And this unlucky lady could have been dropped by the thief as they left the cottage.’
‘Which means there’s a good chance the thief was going to cross the river,’ I said, ‘go back to the squire’s side.’
‘And Paul Haskell saw something he shouldn’t.’
We went back the way we had come and soon there was the river before us, and the stepping stones to cross. No sister waited for me on the opposite bank. Only the trees and the gloom, and the hatred Mrs Haskell had warned us of, the hatred that stalked the trees. I could almost see it. Smoke, but clear. Smoke, without smell. We would breathe it in. And then what would become of us?
SIXTEEN
We crossed the river watched by a hundred pairs of eyes.
The birds filled the branches and their chatter filled my head so that all I could think were bird thoughts, bird noise. When Anna spoke all I heard was bird, until she shouted.
‘What has made so many gather?’
I had no answer. No answer but fear, for it wasn’t natural to see so many birds in one place. I wondered if it was a sign of something, something bad. But there being so many kinds of birds muddled that notion, for there were magpies and blackbirds and small brown ones, and some other littler ones with blue bits on. Signs were one thing only, weren’t they? I didn’t know what to do with all these different parts, save for sticking my fingers in my ears and running, hoping soon to be shot of them.
But that wasn’t to be, for when we came to the fallen oak there were more of them, and closer now, perched on the log in a line of beady watching. I ran at them and flapped, I cawed to be rid of them. It worked – they took to the air. But when we were only a little way past the oak there came a flap flap behind us.
‘Would you look at that?’ Anna said.
I didn’t want to but I did, I turned. The birds had returned to their line on the log.
‘People must feed them,’ Anna said.
‘I doubt many in Trethevy have food to spare for wild birds,’ I said.
We pressed on to the cottages with stops and starts and turnarounds when the path bent a way other than we wanted it to, or brought us to lumpy rocks we hadn’t seen before. At least the birds didn’t follow us, and we found no more ahead. As their cawing and crying died away my breath became easier, my heart less racing. Anna was only curious, and mildly so at that. Still she didn’t feel the woods’ strangeness as I did. Still we were apart on that.
The first of the cottages came in sight, and then, a little way down, a knot of people crowded at the door of one.
‘News of Paul Haskell?’ I said to Anna.
‘Good news, let’s hope.’
We hurried over. I spied David Tonkin, him of the mill, him of the whiskers, and asked what the to-do was.
‘They’re at it again,’ he said.
‘The women across the river? What have they done?’
‘They’ve taken Sarah’s mirror, the one she keeps above the fire. Her father’s, it was.’
‘How do you know they took it?’ Anna said.
A man nearby swung round – Richard Bray, the stinking, drinking fishman. ‘This is how we know!’
He thrust his hand at Anna. In his palm lay a black lump. Coal.
‘It was left in place of the mirror,’ David Tonkin said. ‘They’re laughing at us.’
‘But why would they take a mirror?’ I said.
‘They have a liking for fine things,’ Richard Bray said, whisking the coal away and giving it to the woman Sarah, who I recognised from our meeting in the woods, where we had first met David Tonkin too. ‘Like magpies, they are,’ Bray said. ‘Nasty wenches! And it’s a fine mirror, isn’t it, Sarah?’
Sarah nodded sadly. ‘My father bought it down Falmouth. Come off a wreck, it had. Lovely frame, all curly metal. I’d only gone out to see the chickens. They witched it away.’
David Tonkin shook his head. ‘A bad business.’
‘But we were just at—’
Anna pulled me away by my elbow.
‘But it’s important, what I was saying.’ I wriggled out of her grip. To be held by her was a fine feeling, but only when she wasn’t telling me off. ‘We were just with Miss Franks and Mathilda, which means they can’t have taken Sarah’s mirror.’
‘I agree, but given local opinion of the pair, it doesn’t seem wise to admit our recent visit. Now, turn your thinking round, Shilly. What matters is what was left behind, not what was taken.’
‘You mean the coal? Because that was found where Paul was last seen too.’
‘Which means?’ Anna said.
‘That the thief who took the mirror is the same person who took Paul. If we can find who that is, we can find the boy.’
‘I’d say so, but that way of thinking weakens the case against Miss Wolffs and Miss Franks, given we know they did
n’t steal the mirror as it’s only just been taken.’
‘The squire will be teasy about that,’ I said. ‘He wants rid of them. He mightn’t pay us if he doesn’t get what he wants. I knew we shouldn’t have said yes to him. That was all your doing, Anna.’
‘So we should have refused to help find a missing child? You’re more heartless than I thought.’
‘Me!’
‘If one of the squire’s tenants is to blame for Paul’s disappearance, then I’m sure that information will be just as welcome to the squire. Surely that’s all that matters in the end, to discover the truth?’
A magpie swooped low overhead and I ducked. ‘By any means?’
She was about to speak then caught herself. ‘If you’re referring to what you claim are the revelatory effects of alcohol, then I disagree.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘Then why bother asking?’
She was cross. Her voice was sharp with it. Sharp as the sounds of slate-splitting that reached us on the air. We were near the quarry and so the manor house beyond it and then the road – to Boscastle, to learn more of Miss Franks and Mathilda’s doings there.
‘Because you won’t listen to me,’ I said.
‘You ought to be grateful I won’t. I’m saving you from yourself, Shilly.’
Two more magpies flew over us, swooping through the trees and out of sight. A pair. A coupling. I felt like hurling a slate at them, them who were together.
On a little more and the light grew stronger ahead, making my steps stronger to reach it and be free of the woods, if only for a time.
‘How are we to get to Boscastle, then?’ I said.
‘We’ll ask at the manor house, and while we’re there, it might be worth asking another question too. I’d like to know if Miss Wolffs and Miss Franks were walking here on the morning Paul went missing. They might not have taken Paul Haskell, but they’re clearly hiding something.’
We broke from the trees and followed the path to the house. I guessed it to be noon by then for the sun was high overhead. Now we were free of the tightness of the woods I could feel a bit of breeze, meaning it was less hot than the day before, but still my scalp itched warmly beneath the false hair of Mrs Williams, and I was glad I’d left her fur hat back at the summer house.
The Magpie Tree Page 9