The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  ‘Not the sisters without eyes again, Shilly.’

  ‘Yes, the sisters!’ I shouted. ‘Yes, my hatred of the woods! That is who I am. Now, I would know, before I go one step further on this road with you, who you are.’

  She was looking at the sea, as calm as I was angry. ‘You know who I am,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know that you are a seamstress, that you worked in that theatre place. I know that you recognise the German way of talking. I know that you know what por-s’lain looks like. That you are not from Cornwall, and that you might be from London, although whether that’s true I can’t say. I know you use the name Anna Drake.’

  She drew on her pipe and blew the smoke out to sea. She scratched the end of her thin nose. I wanted to strike her.

  ‘What more do you need to know?’ she said.

  ‘Everything!’ I said.

  ‘You ask for the world, Shilly, and it’s not mine to give. But I can give you a little, if that’ll help.’ She swallowed. She took a deep breath. ‘I am a foundling.’

  And then she looked at me, at last, and I wished that I could take back my words and strike my foolish self with Lucy’s rolling pin, for I hadn’t meant to be so cruel.

  She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t going to wail, as I had. She was simply hollowed out. Blank with it. As she herself was blank. I saw then, as I hadn’t seen before, that she hadn’t kept herself from me for spite, or for not liking me, or because there was something terrible at the heart of who she was.

  She had kept herself from me because she didn’t know who she was at all.

  She cleared her throat and began walking again. ‘Whoever left me on the butcher’s doorstep didn’t want to be found.’

  ‘There was no name for you?’ I said.

  ‘None. If a note was left, in the shawl in which I was wrapped, say, it could have blown away, been lost somehow.’

  It was as if she was speaking of someone else’s life. Her voice was the one she used to review the evidence. And yet the evidence was her past. Herself.

  ‘The only thing worth remarking on,’ she said, ‘apart from the fact my mother had given birth before her time, was a piece of felt tied to my wrist. It was cut in the shape of an animal. Can you guess what that might have been, Shilly, hm?’

  ‘A duck,’ I said.

  ‘How very clever of you!’ She said this with meanness, because she didn’t believe me to be clever at all. ‘I chose “Drake” myself,’ she said, ‘but that was later, when I was another girl.’

  ‘And “Anna”?’ I asked.

  ‘The butcher’s wife liked the symmetry.’

  I frowned.

  ‘It’s the same forward and back,’ Anna explained. ‘The neatness of it has always pleased me so I’ve kept it. If you keep from the drink and keep our bargain, Shilly, I can show you how to write such a word.’

  ‘The butcher and his wife – are they living still? Do you see them?’

  She walked a little faster. ‘That’s a story for another day.’

  We went the rest of the way without talking. I didn’t know what to say, and even if I’d found some words, I doubted she’d want to hear them. It was best to keep to the matter at hand, as Anna was always telling me. If we strayed from it, into ourselves and what we meant to one another, we would lose our way.

  There was a heavy rattle behind us, and I turned to see a wide cart coming on, and a second just behind it. We pressed ourselves against the hedge to let them pass.

  ‘Boscastle looks to be a busy port,’ she said, in an everyday Anna Drake sort of way. I was grateful for such calm talk, such quiet talk. To leave the painful things behind us on the road.

  The carts were going towards the port, as we were, each piled with the storm cloud colours of slate. I wondered if they were from the squire’s quarry. Then another cart was coming, up from the port, and I feared they wouldn’t have room to pass, but just as I thought their sides should splinter against one another, the horses leaping in fright, the carts were passing, the horses trotting on. The cart that came towards us was covered in sacking, hiding its wares, but when the driver spurred his horses all was set to wobbling and something bounced from the cart bed into the road. I picked it up and my hand was all at once filthy, for I had hold of a lump of coal.

  ‘I don’t expect many houses burn coal in this part of the world,’ Anna said.

  ‘Some people must do,’ I said, watching the heavily laden cart round the bend and disappear.

  ‘But at great expense if the coal is brought by ship, even if it only comes from South Wales. Your tin and copper mines don’t do much for warming a house or cooking a stew.’

  ‘They do if you’re the one selling the tin and the copper,’ I said, and pocketed the coal. ‘On the moor, people burn turf. Cut it themselves. It gives a bit of smoke but the smell is good.’

  ‘We’re a fair way from the moor now, though.’

  ‘Plenty of wood,’ I said, and thought about setting fire to the trees.

  ‘And yet a piece of coal was left in Sarah’s house only this morning.’

  ‘It must have come from someone with money,’ I said, ‘and the only place like that in Trethevy is the manor house.’

  ‘Did you notice if the fire was laid when we saw the squire earlier?’

  ‘It wasn’t. It’s too warm to need it in the downstairs rooms.’

  ‘What about in the kitchen?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t go poking in the stove, did I? There was no smell to speak of, but that could be because the flue is working right.’

  ‘There may be coal fires upstairs,’ Anna said. ‘And if there are, there’s bound to be a store of coal somewhere.’

  ‘Which anyone in the house could take a lump from.’

  We had come in sight of roofs and the road began to slope down. The white-grey birds with the orange beaks were closer now, making a terrible racket, and the air was thickening with the smell of Richard Bray’s cottage but riven with something else – salt, as if someone was trying to salt Richard Bray, keep him from rot through the winter. It was the smell of the sea.

  We had arrived in Boscastle.

  NINETEEN

  I told myself I mustn’t be afraid. I told myself that firmly, meanly, even. I pinched the soft part of my arm, above the elbow, to make it true with a bruise. Anna was with me. Charlotte was dead. Boscastle was just a place we had reason to visit, and then to leave. A place I shouldn’t mind so much.

  A place of ropes. That was the first thing I noticed about Boscastle. More than the smell and the noise of all the loading and unloading, the men and women shouting, the children running, the birds diving for the fish brought ashore in little boats, the big boats with trees growing out of their middles a-creak a-creak. I saw all those things, heard and smelt them too, but it was the ropes that struck me. They were all over the place, as if some giant hand had tried to tie the port down, stop it moving. But the whole place strained against being bound – everyone fetching and carrying, calling and heaving. It was all of a jostle, the port of Boscastle.

  A river cut through the jostling and tumbled to a wide patch of sand, and beyond the sand was the sea itself, held small between two cliffs. A wall jutted from each cliff, but neither wall went all the way across the water, and one was set further back than the other. I knew the walls from Mathilda’s drawings. She had made a good likeness of the place, but as I looked at it now, with my own eyes, I found that I was pleased and fearful in equal measure, for people drowned, didn’t they, in the sea?

  ‘Which do you think the worse way to die,’ I asked Anna, ‘being drowned, or having your throat cut?’

  ‘Drowning,’ she said, without pausing to think. ‘It’s much slower than people imagine.’

  She pointed across the river to the sign of an inn and at once I knew my own death. Insensible and falling, insensible and fighting. Sickness, and its loneliness. The drink gave so many ways to die.

  ‘We’ll ask in the inn about lodgings,�
�� Anna said, ‘see if we can find where Miss Wolffs and Miss Franks stayed when they were here.’

  We crossed the river by a steep little bridge, and my steps quickened as we drew close to the inn even as I willed my body to keep from the drink. Not to be that person any more.

  ‘I’ll wait for you here,’ I said, and caught hold of a wooden post all tied with ropes as if I was a boat to be kept from the tide.

  Anna nodded and left me, and I wondered if saying we’d go to the inn had been a test on her part, for she’d have known how much I needed a drink, us coming to this place. The shake was on me so I turned from the inn and looked at the sea again. Thinking about drowning was better than thinking about drink.

  But my eye was drawn from the water, drawn from death, by a young man on a stool near the river’s edge. He was dressed in working clothes and wore a red handkerchief knotted at his throat. He was talking to an older man who stood before him, the older man all in blue, like the sea had dressed him. He wore a blue hat too – a cloth thing, with some lettering on the front in gold. His cheeks and chin were ginger whiskery. A sailor.

  ‘My mate, he said he paid four pence,’ the sailor said.

  ‘That was only for one knot,’ the other man said. He held up a piece of rope, the length of my arm. ‘This has two. Costs double.’

  ‘You can untie one, can’t you?’

  ‘Not once it’s tied. We’d all get scat about, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘I’ll have a different one, then.’

  ‘It’s this or none. Can’t make a new one until this is sold.’

  The sailor grumbled but took some coins from his pocket. He counted out the money, on purpose slow. The other waited, holding the rope strangely, out in front of him with one hand over each knot as if to hide them.

  At last the sailor held out the coins. The other pocketed them swiftly somewhere inside his shirt and then handed over the rope. The sailor ran his fingers over the knots with caution, as if he feared them, and this drew me closer, for what could there be to fear in a knotted rope, in that place of ropes?

  ‘’Ow long do it take to work?’ said the sailor.

  ‘When you’ve untied it? That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘All sorts of things.’

  ‘Sounds like a load of old codswallop to me.’

  ‘If you’d rather risk going without it …’ the other man said.

  The sailor turned to look at the sea rolling beyond the two walls that made the harbour. His hand tightened on the rope and then with one last grumble he went stomping off.

  I gave a start – the man on the stool was looking at me. His eyes were small and he was missing one of his front teeth.

  ‘Why’d he buy that rope?’ I said.

  ‘You putting to sea?’ he said.

  ‘No. Is that what it’s for?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  He straightened his back, settled himself, and took another short length from a pile of such ropes beneath his stool. He ran his hands up and down it, and I wondered that they weren’t made sore by such doing.

  ‘Don’t have to be at sea to need a good head of wind,’ he said without looking up.

  ‘How can a rope bring the wind?’

  ‘What does bring the wind?’

  I didn’t have an answer for that. If I’d been chapel then I’d have said God is the one brings the wind, and brings the sun and the rain and all of that business. But it’d been some time since I’d gone to chapel and then it was only because someone had said I had to.

  The man was tying a knot in the rope. An ordinary knot, no fancy lashed-up thing. He was pulling it tight.

  ‘Four pence,’ he said, and handed it to me.

  ‘I …’

  I heard my name. Anna was on the bridge. I shook my head at her, waved and pointed, meaning that for once she should come to me. And she did, and that pleased me. But when I told her I wanted four pence for the rope, she wasn’t at all pleased.

  ‘Are you planning on restraining suspects?’ she said.

  ‘When I untie the knot, the wind will blow. I want it for the woods. It’s so airless, so closing-in all the time. I’ll untie the knot and then—’

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ A spot of red was growing in each of her thin, pale cheeks.

  The man said nothing, just ran his hands up and down another length of rope.

  ‘Doesn’t matter if you don’t like it,’ I said. ‘You owe me.’

  ‘Oh do I?’ she said.

  ‘Days we been working together, Anna, and I’ve had no pay.’

  ‘We haven’t been paid yet!’

  ‘Call it an advance on wages, then,’ I said, and hung the rope around my neck for carrying.

  ‘Shilly …’

  ‘I’m not moving a step from this spot unless you buy me this rope.’

  After much show of being cross and put out, she found her coin purse and paid the man. He didn’t acknowledge her at all, but he spoke to me.

  ‘Be careful. Using it inland, it will be very strong. At sea the space is greater.’

  I thanked him, and Anna threw up her hands and rued the day she’d ever met me. But I didn’t care. I had something to make the woods a better sort of place to be, and that was a mercy for I’d have to stay there a while longer to find Paul Haskell.

  And now I was in Anna’s debt for it.

  TWENTY

  ‘So?’ I said as we made our way back to the bridge.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘What did you learn at the inn?’

  ‘I’m glad you still care, Shilly, given your diversions into quackery.’

  I waited for her storm to blow itself out. Anna was her own knotted rope sometimes.

  ‘The landlord of the inn had no recollection of the women staying,’ she said at last.

  ‘They’re not easy to forget.’

  ‘True. But the landlord did tell me of two lodging houses to try, both of which are here, on this side of the river. This,’ she said, shielding her eyes against the sun, ‘is one of them.’

  It was a foul-smelling place overlooking the water. Anna rootled out the owner from a dirty corner and described Miss Wolffs and Miss Franks to him, but he said they hadn’t stayed. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t think Miss Franks would put up with the stench, even without much money to her name. The second lodging house was higher up the cliff. It gave the view of the harbour but without the stink of the fish-gutting. The owner, a Mrs Teague, remembered the women well.

  ‘The foreigners? They were here … oh now, let me think.’ She was a dumpy soul, wearing a shiny dress of wide bright stripes that made her look more dumpy still, and which was a close match for the curtains of the parlour she asked us into. ‘They stayed a month at least. I hope nothing’s the matter?’

  ‘I have a letter for them, a letter of great importance,’ Anna said, ready, as always, with a lie. Perhaps that was a talent of foundlings taken in by butchers.

  ‘A letter! Well, wouldn’t you know. After they’d waited so long.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow,’ Anna said.

  ‘Well, they sent so many letters, you see,’ Mrs Teague said. ‘Always asking for paper and ink, and quite firm too, was Miss Franks. The younger one, Miss Wolffs, now, I liked her. As pleasant as Miss Franks was fierce.’

  ‘These letters they were writing,’ Anna said. ‘You don’t happen to know where they were sent?’

  ‘’Fraid I don’t. Posted their letters themselves, though my Samuel offered to take them. Miss Franks was quite bad-tempered when no replies came, but that didn’t stop her sending more. Quite furious with writing, she was. Used to sit there, at that little table in the window, day after day, and Miss Wolffs at the other end doing her drawing. Such lovely scenes she did, and with her hand so shaky! She gave me one of her sketches, you know, and my Samuel made a frame for it. I’ll fetch it—’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Mrs Teague,’ Anna said. ‘I have just a few more questi
ons you might be able to help us with. Did the women speak of what they were doing in Cornwall?’

  ‘I did ask them, only in the course of things, you understand. I’m not one to pry.’

  Oh, Mrs Teague, I thought to myself, I reckon you are one to pry. I should think you peer at keyholes, rootle through bags and steam open letters before you’ve even served breakfast.

  ‘They said they were here for a drawing holiday,’ Mrs Teague said. ‘We’ve lots of artists staying, and writers. They’ve not got much to spend, more’s the pity. That pair were the same. Took the cheapest room and paid weekly.’

  ‘They didn’t book the whole month of their stay upfront?’ Anna said.

  ‘Week by week Miss Franks wanted it. Each Friday I said to my Samuel, they’ll be off tomorrow, you wait, and then Miss Franks would ask to take another week.’

  ‘Did they talk about where they’d come from?’ I said.

  Mrs Teague shook her head. ‘They said very little, really, just Miss Franks asking if any letters had come and Miss Wolffs busy drawing. They talked to each other, of course, but no one here could understand what they were saying, them being foreign. Nothing in the guestbook, either.’

  ‘And when they did leave,’ Anna asked, ‘did they give you a forwarding address in case any letters should come for them?’

  ‘Well, that’s the strange thing. They didn’t, and I said to my Samuel how surprised I was, because they’d been wanting replies so badly. I offered to forward anything that came but Miss Franks wasn’t interested, when for weeks all she’d spoken of were her blessed letters. It must have had something to do with him coming.’

  ‘Him?’ I said.

  ‘Their visitor. They only had the one. He was already with them in here when I got back from fetching the bread. Samuel had let him in, and then Miss Franks had the cheek to shut the door! Even though one of our rules is no private use of the parlour. I couldn’t believe it, and my Samuel, he’s not one for being stern, so I came in.’

  ‘So you saw him, this visitor?’ Anna said.

  ‘Only a glimpse. Miss Franks was up on her feet raging, shouting at me to get out of my own parlour. Well! I wasn’t going to stay there and be so insulted.’