The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  ‘Are they indeed?’ Anna said.

  ‘The saint’s bell,’ I said. ‘It made you leave the cottage in a hurry.’

  ‘I worried the pair would come back because of it, if they thought bad things were coming. When I passed the gatepost on my way to the river, Paul was gone. I thought he must have run home, that he was frightened by the bell. I never guessed it was him being taken that caused the bell to ring in the first place.’

  ‘Did you drop drawing charcoal on the way back to the river?’ I said.

  This confused him. ‘Why would I take their coal? Plenty at the manor house. Are you going to tell the squire?’

  Anna was about to answer but I got there first.

  ‘Have you sold them, the things you took?’

  ‘The shoes are ruined, but everything else cleaned up all right. I took them to Boscastle first thing.’

  ‘Well I don’t see the use in the squire knowing,’ I said. ‘But if anything else should be taken—’

  ‘But what can I do, tell me that?’ He held his stained hands out to us, palms up, as if begging. ‘I don’t want to be taking from people not much better off than me.’

  ‘There must be some other way to pay for the doctor,’ I said. ‘What of Lucy’s family?’

  ‘She hasn’t any. That’s why the squire took her in, after what happened down there.’

  Anna and I looked where he was looking. The quarry.

  ‘Lost her mother and father same day. Crushed.’ Simon shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. ‘She weren’t allowed to see them after. They were …’ He got to his feet and spat.

  ‘What happened?’ Anna said.

  ‘She weren’t more than ten and she had no one, all because that pitman didn’t take the time to blast the rock smaller. He had it hauled up too big, too heavy for the poppet. Head tipped over, into the pit, the block coming down with it. Lucy’s parents were caught. Didn’t have a chance.’

  Anna moved towards him. ‘Who, Simon? Who wasn’t paying attention that day?’

  ‘I don’t say it was his fault. There’s accidents all the time with the slate and there’s many vouched for him afterwards, said the poppet was too close to the edge, that it was the captain’s fault. Squire’s, even, as owner. But if that pitman had just waited. Not been so quick to send that block up top. Everything might have been different.’

  ‘Who was the pitman?’ Anna said.

  He spat again.

  ‘James Haskell.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Simon had nothing more to tell us than his own bitterness and that had told us enough. We watched him weave through the trees, slipping in and out of sight and then he was gone. Back to the manor house with money in his pocket, but for how long?

  ‘We’ve had the wrong idea since we got here, haven’t we?’ I said. ‘Thinking the person who took Paul was also the thief. Simon did the thieving, but I don’t believe he took Paul.’

  Anna sat down next to me on the slab of moor stone.

  ‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘He has no motive. But Lucy does.’

  ‘But Simon said she was still a child when her parents died. She must be seventeen now. Why wait all this time to punish the Haskells?’

  ‘These delusions of illness could have spurred her on, but speculation is no help to anyone. We need to speak to the maid herself.’

  She got up and began walking in the direction of the manor house, but I called for her to stop.

  ‘Lucy can wait,’ I said. ‘There’s someone we must see first.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Haskell.’

  ‘Why on earth would we need to do that? I’ve spent more than enough time in that strange woman’s company today already.’

  ‘It’s her strangeness that matters,’ I said. ‘You said before, to find who took Paul we need to learn about Miss Franks and Mathilda. That them coming to the woods and the boy vanishing were part of the same thing. Now one of them women is dead – murdered, by something feathered. I think … Anna, I think a change comes over women in these woods.’

  Her face was all bewilderment. She’d knocked her wig loose so I straightened it for her, and touched her cheek while I was close enough to do so. She didn’t move away. I didn’t know if she even felt my touch, such was her uncertainty.

  ‘You believe what Simon Proctor said, that Lucy is some kind of … bird?’

  ‘I believe she will be,’ I said. ‘The baby of the red-haired woman will be, too, in time.’

  ‘And Mrs Haskell?’

  ‘She’s already changed. Won’t show her skin, will she?’

  ‘Her lie about being caught in the mill fire is still unexplained,’ Anna said. ‘But a bird?’

  ‘That’s how she reached Miss Franks and Mathilda so quickly after we stopped Peter being taken. She … she didn’t have to walk.’

  ‘But none of this is proof, Shilly. At best I might say it’s a theory, and an outlandish one at that.’

  ‘There’s this too.’

  I took from my pocket the scrap of paper I’d been carrying. It was crumpled and soggy but the shape it bore was still clear. Wretchedly so. It was the shape Mathilda kept drawing.

  Anna took the paper from me. ‘You believe this to be a representation of Mrs Haskell? In …’

  ‘In her true form. Yes, I do. But I need help to see it. It’s the only way, Anna.’

  She looked longingly towards the manor house and the ordinariness she had been seeking there. Informing a magistrate of a death. Asking questions about known things – stolen spoons and quarry accidents. And now there was something else. Something that lay hidden beneath women’s skin and when it came to light, the world was different.

  ‘It’s a guess, Anna, but what if I’m right?’

  She kicked the moor stone slab, and I knew then she’d follow my notion.

  ‘We might as well put a stop to this nonsense now. Come on if you’re coming, Shilly-shally.’

  ‘I need money.’

  ‘Now? Whatever for?’

  ‘If I keep stealing from Richard Bray then I’m no better than Simon Proctor. You have to pay for what I need. It won’t take much, I promise.’

  She brushed past me. ‘So be it, Shilly.’

  I had half of what I wanted. Her trust, if not her love.

  ‘Back again, my sweet?’

  Mrs Haskell was in the doorway, smiling, her family safe and making a racket in the house behind her.

  ‘We must speak to you,’ I said. ‘Away from here.’ The words felt too big for my tongue. I steadied myself against the door frame. I hadn’t had much but I’d had it quickly. Bolted it, and not just because it would help me see. Because I wanted it too.

  ‘Now, my sweet? But I’ve the fire going and the pastry’s made.’

  ‘It’s about the death of Miss Franks,’ Anna said.

  ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that. Come in, if you’re coming. There’s plenty.’ She turned away, chiding the girls to make room for the visitors.

  ‘A feather,’ I said. ‘It choked her.’

  Mrs Haskell ceased moving, ceased breathing I thought. As if she’d been changed to moor stone like the girls in the stories caught dancing on Sundays.

  ‘Why’re you letting the rain in, Mother?’ James Haskell appeared behind her. ‘You don’t have to worry any more, she’s—oh.’ He saw us and was surprised at our returning. ‘What’s the matter now?’

  His presence made his mother come alive again and she was speaking brightly, taking a hat from the peg.

  ‘This kind pair have come to tell me Sarah’s poorly. She’s asking for me. I’ll not be long. Keep the fire hot.’

  Before he could question her she’d shut the door and was walking towards the river.

  ‘Lies come easy to you, Mrs Haskell,’ Anna said as we followed.

  ‘We all have our talents,’ she muttered, and glanced at me askance. ‘Though not all of us know them.’

  I didn’t like the look she was giving
me, her so knowing with it, so I put the bottle to my lips again and rode the burn of what it held like others might ride a horse. Deep in the saddle and clenching. There was a flitter of black overhead. I didn’t look up. I knew what it was. The birds were coming.

  Mrs Haskell didn’t stop until she’d reached the fallen oak, which she seemed to judge a good place for talking of death. As she sat down on its mossy back the branches of the trees nearby dipped. The leaves rustled as the birds took their places.

  Anna looked about her. ‘And so we are in session.’

  ‘Are you acting judge, then, Miss Drake?’

  ‘I’ll make sure you’re set before one, charged with the murder of Gertrud Franks.’

  But this was all noise, as bad as the birds’ chatter above, as the trees’ muttering and tightening. I drank again and the noise dropped away. I stalked the fallen log. Made a circle of it to see the creature from all sides.

  ‘And what proof have you that I harmed her?’ Mrs Haskell said. ‘A feather? There’s no shortage of them here.’

  At her words one fell to the ground before me. Tumbling, slower than was natural, the way the snow had fallen once in Blisland when I was a child. She had called that feather down, as she called the birds to her.

  ‘You can’t deny your motive is clear,’ Anna was saying. ‘You believed the women had taken your grandson. When Peter was nearly taken too you sought revenge. You thought Paul was likely dead by then. There was no point waiting for them to give him up. You went to the cottage and you—’

  ‘And I what, Miss Drake?’

  ‘You let your true self be seen,’ I said. ‘We saved Peter, found Paul. In exchange we’ll have the truth from you, Mrs Haskell. There was no fire at the mill. The reason you cover yourself like this, the reason you hide – it’s not because of burns. It’s because of who you are. What you are.’

  The birds began to cry and then to scream. I covered my ears and fell to the ground. Anna rushed over to me.

  ‘Shilly! What’s wrong?’

  ‘Can’t you hear them?’

  Anna’s mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear her. Then a voice came clearer through the birds’ din.

  She can’t hear and she can’t see. You know that, Shilly, my sweet. Why do you seek her agreement of what you know to be true?

  Mrs Haskell stood. She drew her shawl from her shoulders. A corpse taking off a winding sheet. She let it fall. She unbuttoned her dress and drew her arms from the sleeves. She bared herself to us, her unclothed flesh. The rain still fell but I didn’t think she’d feel the cold as the rest of us might.

  Not with her skin the way it was.

  Anna put her hand to her mouth, looked away.

  I stepped forward, the drink making me slow and stumbling. Touched Mrs Haskell’s arm. Felt the callouses, the whorls of hardened skin that covered her body. I stroked her, pressed and rubbed to know her and her strangeness. She watched me, her wide face, her dark eyes curious, as if she hadn’t believed I would be so bold. But now the drink was in me.

  I heard Anna’s voice as if from far away, telling me not to touch that which might spread, might taint me. She was still in a world of ordinary sickness. I closed my ears to such talk and spoke in the language that Mrs Haskell used. That we shared. That I needed the drink to know. An unspoken language that waited in moor stone and magpies and roots reaching down into old water. Into well water.

  Show me.

  She closed her eyes. Twisted her mouth as if in pain. Beneath my hand still pressed against her breast I felt a stirring and jumped back. Broke our closeness for she had moved beyond me now. She was a different kind of beast.

  You see me, Shilly-shally?

  From the callouses came ticklish things reaching, flaring. Lengthening into the feathers I had known were there, within her. She crossed her arms over her chest and when she uncrossed them again, shadows hung from them. She lifted these shadows, these dark wings, opened them out, and before me was the shape Mathilda had been drawing. It had been a scrawl, made from fear, but the outline was the same. The tips of the wings, held up – two points. The curve of them below. And within that black shape, Mrs Haskell’s face was her face, her hair was her hair, but her body was not her body and her hands—

  Her hands were like blades.

  I threw the bottle to the ground and it must have struck stone for there came a smash and I cried out and covered my head.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When I could look again Mrs Haskell was buttoning her dress with swiftness that belied what had just been, as if she was cross to have found herself half-dressed in the woods in the rain, two strangers watching her. Anna was twitching, shaking her head like she was throwing off a wasp.

  The power of the drink had left me, and left behind pain. My head was two slates struck together. I blinked until the blurriness before me was only that caused by the rain. Mrs Haskell’s skin was the same as when she had first undone her dress – the whorls were there, the callouses. The feathers had gone.

  ‘You … you call it into being?’ I said.

  ‘Another of my talents. Takes some learning, though. My mother taught me that.’

  ‘I’m sorry – what are you talking about?’ Anna was staring dumbly at us.

  I knew then that she’d seen nothing but Mrs Haskell’s strangely marked flesh. She hadn’t seen the change. That was something that had passed only between me and the old woman who chose who was to see. Who was to be made fearful. Mathilda and I shared that.

  ‘Simon Proctor told us it’s in the blood,’ I said.

  ‘That’s part of it.’ Mrs Haskell picked up her shawl from where it lay across the fallen oak.

  ‘And the other part?’

  ‘The woods. They choose us. A day will come when I’ll join the woods forever. Each time I push the other self away, it’s harder to come back to skin.’ She held out her hands and peered at them.

  ‘Do people know? Your family?’

  ‘There’s some you can’t hide from and there’s no use trying.’

  I glanced briefly at Anna who was looking furious with our secret talking.

  ‘Why did you only kill Miss Franks?’ I said.

  ‘The eldest, she was full of hate. Her plots. Her schemes. The woods were stirred up by it. The path shifting. The birds driven mad. The other one, the girl, well. She’s weaker. She’ll go. And if she doesn’t—’

  ‘You’ll kill her too,’ Anna said.

  ‘But Mrs Haskell,’ I said, keeping my distance, keeping safely away now I knew what lay beneath her skin, ‘the woods are still as they were before you killed Miss Franks. Nothing has been eased by her death. Can’t you see, you made a mistake? Those women didn’t take Paul.’

  ‘They did it. I know they did it.’

  ‘But they were seen at the manor house at the same time Paul disappeared,’ Anna said. ‘And when Peter was nearly taken, they were in the cottage.’

  ‘Your own anger has blinded you,’ I said. ‘You know they aren’t witches like the others think. You know that because … you know what that means.’

  ‘She took them! My boys! I know she did and she paid for it.’

  The birds rose in a frenzy of wings and screaming as Mrs Haskell bore down on me. I feared I’d be taken next. Would go in the ground with Miss Franks, my face raked beyond anyone knowing it was me beneath the blood and torn flesh.

  ‘The other must go too,’ Mrs Haskell said, shaking her shawl at me. ‘We can’t rest easy until then. None of us can. She doesn’t belong here. Tell her. Tell her she’s a stranger and she must go.’

  ‘And us?’ I said. ‘We’re strangers too. Will you smother everyone in the woods you don’t know?’

  She wrapped her shawl around her, once more sealing up her marked flesh beneath layers of cloth. She didn’t speak until that task was done, and she looked more the kind, slow-moving woman I knew now that she was not.

  ‘You did good here,’ she said. ‘Finding Paul, saving Peter. I’m grateful fo
r that. The girl – she’s not like either of you.’

  ‘Because she’s foreign?’ Anna said. ‘She’s done you no harm, Mrs Haskell.’

  ‘They should never have come here.’ The old woman turned and began walking back to the cottages. ‘You tell her. She has until the light goes. I’ll grant her that, but only for you, Shilly. For what you did for my family.’

  ‘So that’s why she lied about the fire in the old mill,’ Anna said, watching Mrs Haskell go. ‘To cover her shame.’

  ‘Shame?’

  ‘She’s clearly had some terrible affliction in the past. To be marked in such a way. It can’t be leprosy or she’d have been turned out, but she must feel compelled to hide her disfigurement from those around her.’

  ‘The marks on her skin,’ I said, ‘did you see what came out of them?’

  ‘Came out of them? Shilly …’ She shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t have given in to you. It’s my fault. I just don’t know the best way to help, what to do for you. If you keep on like this, the drink will kill you.’

  ‘If you want me to help you, to do the things you can’t, this is the only way. You do want me, don’t you, Anna?’

  She threw up her hands and I felt like doing likewise for I didn’t know what to do for the best for her. How to make her see.

  ‘Mrs Haskell had the means to choke Miss Franks with that feather,’ I said. ‘You might not have seen that, Anna, but I did.’

  ‘For now, perhaps we can agree on what was said, if not shown? Mathilda is in danger.’

  ‘But we’ll keep her safe, won’t we?’ I said.

  ‘We can try.’

  I caught the smell at the doorway of the cottage – sweet and sharp, and I tasted bile.

  ‘We should be grateful the heat has dropped or it’d be much worse,’ Anna said.

  She tucked her nose into her elbow then pushed open the door. The smell was terrible inside, but the place was as we’d left it. Miss Franks’ body was still in the chair, the old coat over her face. But there was a new sound. A burring whirring sound coming from Miss Franks herself.