‘She won’t harm us,’ I said. ‘She’s afraid.’
The flush that usually warmed the girl’s cheeks was gone, replaced by a grey pallor. Sweat gleamed at her temples, above her lip, though the room was cold. Her lips moved. I leant closer but could glean no sound from her mouthing. Without meaning to I caught a glimpse of her companion’s strained and bloody face beyond, her arm hanging down to the floor.
‘Mathilda must have seen what happened,’ I said. ‘The shock has sent her mute.’
‘Or it’s guilt that keeps her silent.’
Anna grabbed Mathilda by her fleshy forearm and hauled her to her feet. The paper in the girl’s lap slid to the floor but she still drew the shape in the air before her, as if the paper was there to press on. Her gaze remained fixed on the fire.
‘Did you kill Gertrud?’ Anna said, and shook her.
Mathilda moved soft and wobbly, as if her bones had left her. Anna let her go and she remained as she was, standing, looking into the fire, her lips twitching silent words. I put a hand on each of her shoulders and gently pushed her back into her chair.
‘You’ll get no sense out of her tonight,’ I said. ‘We need brandy, for the shock.’
‘Don’t go looking, Shilly. That’s the last thing we need.’
‘So what do we need?’
‘A coroner, to establish cause of death, and then the magistrates will—’
Mathilda screamed.
I thought my heart had stopped, that I’d be a second corpse on Anna’s hands.
‘No, no, no,’ Mathilda said, looking at us at last. ‘No more spying.’
‘It’s not spying. It’s the law.’ Anna stood squarely in front of her. ‘We must let the magistrates know there’s been a death. An inquest will follow.’
‘No!’ Mathilda said, her voice hoarse. ‘No strangers. Gertrud, she will not like it.’
‘Gertrud won’t know anything about that,’ I said gently. ‘She’s gone. You don’t have to worry about her now.’
‘No strangers. The shame of it – it follow her. She could not bear it. No shame, no shame, Mathilda.’
‘Perhaps,’ Anna said, moving closer to Miss Franks’ body, ‘you wish to hide your own part in this, Mathilda. Save yourself from the gallows.’
‘No one must know,’ Mathilda murmured. ‘No one must know.’
Anna’s candle sent shadows across the dead woman’s face, making her look like some giant fish left for gutting on Richard Bray’s table.
‘You wish to hide your crime?’ Anna said. ‘To hide how you killed her?’
Mathilda shook her head, which set free a small sob. ‘The crime? Is two. Both hidden. In her now, too. Is hidden.’
‘But the dead can speak,’ Anna said. ‘What secrets will Miss Franks spill once we’ve sent for the coroner?’
‘She say no more. Her throat. It stopped. Stop stop, yes? Like a bottle.’
‘Stoppered?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Look. See.’
Anna hesitated. She’d been so cocksure, goading Mathilda, but now she looked uncertain. In the end her curiosity decided her.
‘Take my candle, Shilly.’ She glanced once more at Mathilda as if checking for tricks, then peered into Miss Franks’ mouth. ‘The tongue is swollen, as I would expect. Some blood. Her teeth gnashing at the end. There’s nothing—wait. What on earth …’
‘What is it?’ I said, leaning closer. Hot wax slipped from the candle to the floor, just missing Anna’s fingers as they opened Miss Franks’ spitted lips.
‘There’s something down there,’ Anna said, ‘in her throat.’
She widened Miss Franks’ mouth and reached into it, pushing her fingers down the dead woman’s throat. I gagged.
Without looking up from her task, Anna said, ‘Don’t turn your back on her.’
But Mathilda had no interest in what we were about. She was drawing again, even though she held no paper. She was drawing on her skirt.
‘I have it!’ Anna said, and she began to pull.
Her fingers came clear with a horrid sucking sound, as if Miss Franks was herself letting them go. A thin pointed thing, white-ish, was leaving Miss Franks’ mouth. Mathilda began to sob.
Anna kept pulling, had to lift her arm high for the thing was long. The pointed end gave way to something black, something thick.
‘My God,’ Anna murmured.
A foot long. Two. Three. And still it came, this thing that had been driven down Miss Franks’ throat, that had stopped her breath.
At last the end of it came clear. Anna held it away from her, as if not wanting to risk touching it more than she had to. She laid it on the table, amid the broken trinkets. Sodden and stinking of bile, of death, a feather.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Mathilda had slipped back into silence. Neither Anna nor I could make her say how a three-foot-long feather had found its way down her companion’s throat, nor how they’d both come by their injuries. We couldn’t make her say anything at all.
‘They haven’t been attacked equally,’ Anna said, peering closely at Miss Franks’ torn face. ‘These wounds are far more severe than Mathilda’s scratches.’
‘But the same thing did them.’
‘Possibly.’
‘So Mathilda is a victim as much as Miss Franks,’ I said.
Mathilda was once more staring into the fire without seeing. Her eyes were glazed. She swayed, even though she was seated. Her bloodied hand still drew the same strange shape.
‘You might be right,’ Anna said. ‘She’d hardly have scratched her own hands. But until we know more …’
She limped into the next room, where the bed was, and returned with a large shawl of fine blue cloth, then she took up her knife and ripped the shawl in half.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘Tie her hands.’
‘What?’
‘It’s too dark to go back out there now. Even if we managed not to fall in the river, we’d likely break our necks on tree roots.’
I saw that the windowpanes were indeed black. No curtains to hide us from those who might be spying still. With the candles lit we were easy to see from out there. As Miss Franks and Mathilda had been every night.
‘So we’re staying,’ Anna said, ‘and that being the case, I’d rather have one less thing to worry about. Tie her hands.’
‘Anna, please. She’s suffered enough. Look at the state she’s in!’
‘Something strange has happened here tonight, Shilly. I wouldn’t say I understand it, and I daresay you won’t, either. Until we know more, please tie this woman’s hands. No conjuring knots, mind.’
Her voice betrayed her. She was afraid. I was none too strong-hearted myself, so I did as she asked, trying not to touch Mathilda’s wounds as I did so. Even so, the silk was soon dark with her blood.
‘We’ll put her in the bedroom,’ Anna said.
I wasn’t sure we could lift Mathilda, even with the two of us, but when I pulled on the girl’s arm she stood willingly, and let herself be guided to her bed. She lay down when Anna told her to. She has gone soft, I said to myself. A child-woman, her mind weakened by the shock. Oh for a drink for us all!
Anna still felt there to be threat even in such a mute, meek girl, and so she tied Mathilda’s feet together with the other half of the ripped shawl. Then, for good measure she tied Mathilda’s feet to the bedpost.
‘Leave the door open,’ Anna said. ‘If she should somehow get free then I’d rather see her coming.’
As I turned to go I looked again at the poor figure on the bed. Her eyes were open but her lips were tightly closed. Her fingers were twitching. Trying, still, to draw.
In the main room was another poor soul, this one beyond pity. But still I felt it, for what a terrible way to die.
‘Miss Franks might not have been talking to the Devil,’ I said, ‘but others could have been.’
‘You believe the culprit to be of … otherworldly origins?’ Anna sa
id.
‘You don’t? What’s your reasoning then, how it was done?’
She perched on the upturned box Miss Franks had sat on when we first visited, and I took Mathilda’s chair. The wood still held the girl’s warmth. Anna and I both looked at Miss Franks, as if we were paying her a call. Guests of a dead woman. She eyed us just as sourly as before.
Anna cleared her throat and turned so that she couldn’t see Miss Franks.
‘I do not believe the bird to whom that feather belongs is from the woods of Trethevy—’
‘So you do think it’s done by the Devil!’
‘If you’d let me finish. I was going to say that the bird might be from further afield – much further. Collectors have access to specimens that you and I could only dream of, Shilly, exotic wildlife discovered far from these shores, shot and stuffed for posterity. Someone could have used the feather of such a thing to kill Miss Franks, safe in the knowledge it would be difficult to identify the weapon.’
‘But that would cost money, wouldn’t it? Having one of them foreign birds?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Anna said.
‘Well, I know who has money in this part of the world.’
‘Your thoughts lead you to the squire again, Shilly.’
‘They do, but …’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t think a human hand ripped Miss Franks’ face to rags, do you?’ I said. ‘That’s a claw done that. Talons.’
‘Using another part of the same stuffed creature?’ Anna said. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. But putting to one side for a moment the means, let’s consider motive. If both women were attacked by the same individual, why not kill Mathilda too?’
‘Because it was only Miss Franks they wanted? And Mathilda’s wounds, she got them fighting whatever it was. Trying to save her friend.’
We both looked at Miss Franks again. Anna shivered. I found a fire iron amongst the papers on the floor and stirred up the embers.
‘The fire needs more wood,’ I said. ‘I could go out—’
‘There’s plenty to be burnt here.’
Anna snatched up sheets of paper, scrunched them and threw them into the hearth. Mathilda’s drawings, but I didn’t stop Anna burning them. I didn’t want to go outside any more than she wanted me to go, and Mathilda now seemed beyond such fine work as was lying all around us. I looked at a few of her sketches before feeding them to the growing flames – the harbour walls at Boscastle. The springy green of the cliffs that looked over them. And then something else. The black lines she’d been drawing when we arrived.
‘This shape Mathilda kept doing,’ I said. ‘What do you make of it?’
Anna took the page I held out to her. ‘Not much. A boat?’ She threw it into the fire before I could stop her.
‘I don’t think that’s what it is.’
‘Mathilda went on about them, didn’t she? “Fish boats”, she called them.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but … I don’t know. They make me think of something else, but I can’t catch on it.’
‘You’re likely right about the shock. The compulsion to produce that pattern – it’s a symptom.’
I decided to put the shape in my pockets – my two pockets. I folded up one of Mathilda’s drawings and put it in a pocket in my dress for things that could be touched. But I put it in a second pocket too, and that was a pocket in my head, for wonderings. Wonderings might be just as helpful as things that could be touched. I still had in this pocket of wonderings the fact that people in Trethevy weren’t well – Lucy at the manor house, the poxed baby.
‘I’m sure they must be connected,’ Anna was saying.
A spark crackled from the flames and landed on Miss Franks’ knee. Before I thought about what I was doing, I was patting it out. Her stiffening body wobbled, her torn face jounced, the blood and flesh glistening in the candlelight. I moved my chair away from her.
‘Who is connected?’ I said.
‘Not “who” but “what”, Shilly. The disappearance of Paul Haskell and the death of Miss Franks.’
‘But Peter almost disappeared this afternoon as well, and if Miss Franks was here in the cottage at that moment, and Mathilda too, it can’t have been either of them who tried to take him, and who might’ve taken Paul as well.’
‘So where does that leave us? Back with the feather?’
I went over to it, glad to have a reason not to look at Miss Franks any longer, and picked up the weapon that had likely ended her life. It was dryer now than when Anna had first pulled it from the wetness of Miss Franks’ throat, and so had fluffed out, as Anna fluffed her cropped yellow hair when she took off her wigs. The feather was three inches at its widest part, tapering to an inch at the tip. Apart from the touch of white at the bottom, where the sharp nib was, the feather was deep black.
‘A connection,’ I said, ‘between the boys being taken and Miss Franks’ death. I think I have one.’
‘What is it?’
The fire crackled. Beyond the window, the sound of ferns and leaves moving as some animal stole past.
I held up the feather. ‘The magpie tree.’
TWENTY-NINE
We left the cottage at first light, and mizzle was in the air. Anna eyed the scrap of dark cloud above the cottage, the only part of the sky the trees couldn’t hide.
‘If the rain worsens, then any evidence at the magpie tree might be lost,’ she said.
‘Then we must hurry.’
I handed her the stick she’d used the day before, and we set off.
Anna had refused to untie Mathilda before we left, and all I could do was tip a drop of water into the girl’s mouth. She’d said nothing since telling us Miss Franks’ throat was stoppered. Miss Franks herself I had covered with an old coat I found on the scullery floor. It was stiff with mud, and she wouldn’t have liked it being anywhere near her, but I couldn’t leave her looking out at the world with that one remaining eye. The blood on her face had darkened to near black.
‘So do you believe in him now?’ I asked Anna as we made our way to the river.
‘In who?’
‘St Nectan.’
Her foot was better able to bear weight than the day before so she hopped swiftly through the ferns and the fallen branches and all the traps the woods set for us.
‘I believe there’s a dead woman in the cottage we’ve just left,’ Anna said, ‘that yesterday you witnessed an attempted abduction, and another child remains missing. Each of these events were preceded by a bell ringing, which all and sundry in these parts attribute to a long-dead saint. Who might never have existed in the first place. Who very likely didn’t.’
‘But the bell did act as warning. It rang as Peter was being taken.’
‘Shilly, I’ve already told you what the quarry captain said. It’s a coincidence the blasting bell rang just as the figure tried to take Peter, and an unfortunate one at that. The superstition will only gain more credence.’
‘But have you heard any blasting since we came to the woods?’ I asked her. ‘There wasn’t any yesterday, after the bell had rung.’
‘I doubt we’d have heard it near the summer house. The trees grow so close together, they would muffle the noise.’
‘They’re not so thick as all that,’ I muttered.
‘Are you an expert on blasting, Shilly? And the science of how sound travels?’
I didn’t know what ‘expert’ was so I suspected I wasn’t, and so I gave no answer to her peevishness.
‘And besides,’ she said, ‘just because the alarm is sounded doesn’t mean the charge will go off. Not everything goes to plan.’
We had come to the crossing stones and I lent her my arm, even though she was being teasy and I had little patience for it. There had been no blasting because the bell wasn’t rung by the quarry. It was rung by the saint. I knew it, I knew it deep as the marrow of my bones.
I led the rest of the way, and when we began the climb up to the summer house I reached behind me
to haul Anna when she needed help. The mizzle had made the going wet, and my boots slipped often as they sought purchase. At last we reached the top, where the ground flattened out again. We were muddy and panting. There was the summer house, our home, of sorts, looking out over the waterfall, and beyond it a little way, standing alone in the clearing, the magpie tree. One bird watched us from the branches.
‘The magpies in these woods are certainly unnatural,’ Anna said. ‘But I haven’t seen any with feathers three feet long and three inches wide. We’ve yet to find that bird.’
‘There,’ I said, and pointed to the summer house, the side furthest from the door. ‘That’s where I last saw the figure trying to take Peter.’
‘Then that’s where we’ll start.’
We found marks where the ground was soft, six feet or so from the summer house. The print of a shoe, or the toe of it, at least, and next to it were others, those of a little boot, much clearer to see for it had scored the ground. Peter had struggled.
‘From what you saw of the figure yesterday,’ Anna said, ‘have you any sense if it was male or female?’
‘None,’ I said. ‘The cloak covered them. I saw only the face and that was … not as it should have been.’
‘What of build, then?’
‘Not tall.’
‘That’s it?’ Anna said. ‘You’re no more use than Peter Haskell, and at least he had the excuse of taking a blow to the head.’
‘It all happened so quickly!’ I said.
Even to myself, this reason sounded poor. Anna would think my not knowing much was drink. I resolved to keep her thoughts on other things.
‘Here’s another part of a print, look,’ I said.
This one was further from the summer house, towards the trees on the other side of the clearing.
‘From the same shoe, I think, but see how it’s turned the other way.’ I hitched up my skirts to squat beside it. ‘Not enough of a mark to know the size, though.’
‘But what it does indicate,’ Anna said, ‘is that the wearer came to the clearing and left it again by the same means.’
The Magpie Tree Page 16