The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t, Sir Vivian. We believe there is just one person involved.’

  ‘Really? Who?’

  ‘Your little maid, Lucy,’ I said. ‘She took Paul Haskell.’

  His mouth fell open and he pitched forward in his chair.

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Vivian,’ Anna said, ‘but you don’t appear pleased to hear we have solved the mystery. You wanted an answer to who had taken Paul Haskell. We believe that we have that answer.’

  ‘But Lucy? I did not think …’ His fat fingers had begun to fuss one another.

  ‘You were sure it was Miss Franks and Miss Wolffs,’ I said, ‘but they don’t talk to the Devil, you see. They talk German to themselves, for that’s where they’re from. That’s their own talking. It was just that the people listening to them didn’t know the words.’

  The squire’s fingers stopped fussing. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It’s something of a coincidence,’ Anna said, her gaze never leaving the squire.

  ‘What is, Miss Drake?’

  ‘That a pair of German women should set up home in the woods of Trethevy, right on the doorstep of someone who has been to their native land.’

  A high little laugh came from him. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth remarking on,’ he said. ‘Many people visit that country.’

  We let him wait then before we spoke further. We needed no sign to know that we should do so. It was because we had learnt how to work together, for some things at least. It was as if the air had a heartbeat and we were counting it out. I knew when to speak again.

  ‘I think it is worth saying, Sir Vivian. And it’s worth saying that you met the pair of them in Boscastle. And that you chose not to tell us this when you asked us to find Paul Haskell.’

  ‘You are mistaken, Mrs Williams.’

  ‘You’re saying you didn’t visit the German women at a lodging house run by a Mrs Teague?’ I said. ‘She described a man much like you. He wore a patch over one eye, as if to hide an affliction. Or something that would make it clear who he was.’

  ‘A mistake. The woman in Boscastle is mistaken, and at any rate, what does it matter now? Mrs Carne tells me the women have been driven from the woods after violence against them, so I don’t see the need—’

  ‘Ah, there you are mistaken, Sir Vivian,’ Anna said. ‘One of the women is still with us.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Which?’

  ‘The younger of the two, Miss Wolffs,’ I said. ‘She’s quite safe with us.’

  Anna stiffened at my side and I saw my mistake at once. But the squire wasn’t listening, for someone was knocking on the door. He crossed the room to open it and there was Lucy, her dress badly buttoned and a shawl wrapped tight around her neck.

  She bobbed and mumbled, ‘Mrs Carne said I was wanted.’

  The squire pulled her into the room and she flinched at his touch, did her best not to cry out.

  ‘These women wish to speak to you about the disappearance of Paul Haskell.’

  ‘But they’ve found him, haven’t they?’

  ‘Miss Drake, Mrs Williams, I will leave you to your questioning. Good day to you.’

  Anna started towards him. ‘Sir Vivian, we haven’t finished—’

  But he was gone, the door shut behind him.

  Lucy stood before us, bewildered and in pain. ‘M-M-Mrs Carne said I’ll be hanged. I’ve done nothing wrong, I swear it.’

  I rushed to the door, but before I reached it I heard the key turn in the lock. Then another door slammed somewhere.

  Anna was at the window. ‘He’s going into the woods! He must be after Mathilda.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Lucy cried.

  And then the bell began to ring.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘Mrs Carne! Mrs Carne, open this door!’

  Anna thumped the door, kicked it, wrenched the handle. No help came, and there wasn’t any time. The bell was tolling the saint’s warning and it was all my fault. I had let slip Mathilda was in the summer house and the squire had been a man undone.

  I picked up a chair and threw it at the window that faced the woods. The glass cracked but didn’t smash so I threw the chair again, and then Anna came and did likewise. Together we broke the window. Together we had an escape.

  I made to climb out but Anna stopped me.

  ‘Wait! You’ll cut yourself.’

  She got hold of Lucy who was cowering behind a table like a frightened rabbit, looking from the broken window to the door and all a tremble. Anna yanked her shawl away and Lucy screamed.

  ‘No! You mustn’t take—’

  ‘We know all about you,’ Anna said. ‘Simon told us. And we’ve seen Mrs Haskell.’

  Lucy made a choking sound and covered her mouth. Anna got the shawl free and threw it across the wicked-looking glass still attached to the window frame, and then we were free, running to the woods.

  ‘It was the squire, not Lucy?’ I said between gulps of air.

  ‘He’s revealed his true self at last.’ Her words were almost lost in the bell’s din. ‘He took Paul to make everyone hate Gertrud and Mathilda, drive them out.’

  ‘And Mrs Haskell did just as he wanted,’ I said. And now I knew that I had to do as I didn’t want to. Do what was needed.

  I let my fingers catch the wide trunk of an oak as we ran.

  Help us

  A jolt ran through my arm, across my chest. I felt it flicker in my teeth.

  Anna was turning it all over as we ran. ‘But why he wanted them gone so badly, we still don’t know. We have to hope we’re in time. If the path should change—’

  ‘It won’t,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Even if I’d had the breath to spare the words, I couldn’t have told her. I was speaking in a soundless tongue, the one Mrs Haskell had spoken to me.

  Let us pass

  I brushed another trunk, then a long-hanging branch. Still I felt the woods’ anger but this time I didn’t cower from it.

  Take us to her

  The roots made way for us. The path stayed true for us. And I hadn’t touched a drop.

  The cottages were shut up tight. If anyone was there to see us race past, there was no sign of them. The fallen oak passed in a blur. At the monks’ wall I heard a scream from above.

  ‘Anna, look!’

  The squire was in the water, just shy of the falls. He was in up to his chest and struggled against the current wishing to drag him over, and against Mathilda. He had her by the hair. He was going to throw her over the waterfall.

  I climbed up to the summer house, calling out to Mathilda as I went. The going was slick with the mud and my fear but I kept on. Nearly at the top. There was the summer house, there was the ledge. I faltered at the steep drop, the dark churning water below. But then I heard her, Mathilda, poor frightened Mathilda, screaming for help, and I found a scrap of courage. Enough to get down on my knees.

  I lowered myself over the ledge but clung on with my fingers while I scrabbled to set my feet on the thin sapling that grew from the bank below. It bucked with my weight but if I could just drop down and grasp the branches—

  ‘Shilly!’ Anna’s face above me was white.

  I let go of the ledge with one hand and reached for the branches. And then I was falling.

  The water hit me – a cold, hard slap. My feet were above my head. My fingers caught small stones. I had time to think how smooth they were before I realised I was choking. The current had me – was dragging me along the bottom. Towards the falls.

  I fought it, lashed out. My dress had become huge as it snagged around me. Then my knees were on the stones, then my foot. I stumbled and there was light again. I was breathing. I could see.

  The squire had Mathilda at the edge of the falls. She struggled to free herself but he was stronger and dragged her by the arm. He was shouting all the time – his words sounding like those Gertrud and Mathilda had used. German words.

  The current raced me towards them but to
o fast. It wanted to carry me over, light as a fallen leaf. As the water whirled me to the falls, I slammed my feet into the squire’s knees and he doubled over with a roar. Mathilda slipped below the water, her arms flailing. She didn’t come up again. I tried to get hold of her shirt tail, which flapped behind her like a sail on a boat in Boscastle harbour, but sudden pain in my shoulder sent me limp. The squire hauled me up and shoved me against a moor stone slab. I felt the grind of its roughness on my back. Cold air beneath my neck. Fifty feet below me, the plunge pool surged. The Dark River, waiting.

  The squire was shouting but all I could hear was the pounding of the water and a voice in my head saying, this is how you die. You will be drowned. It won’t be the drink after all. Anna was wrong. Oh Anna, Anna. I felt myself lifted, rising up.

  And then there was another voice, wordless, shrieking, and not only in my head for the squire looked around. I saw her before he did and my heart stopped, I would swear it. I died there, when her shadow fell across me, when her blades sliced into the squire’s back.

  He screamed and I was dumb. She lifted him from the water and his blood fell upon me like rain. His face was disbelief as he caught sight of the creature who had come to save me, as I had saved her grandsons. Some last strength came to him then and he grabbed her arm that was her wing and made her twist. They were a tumble of black and white then, and the red of his blood washing down his arms, turning his shirt pink. I scrambled to get away, get out from under them, and her feathers slipped across my cheek. Soft. Like the best of Anna’s coats.

  Mrs Haskell tilted for a moment, ungainly on the falls’ lip, and then she gripped the squire more tightly in her shadowed arms, and they were gone.

  I didn’t look back. Ahead of me was what mattered. Mathilda, her head below the water, drifting near the bank. I fought the current with strength I didn’t know I had, with hope I didn’t know could find me. And there was the reason, a rope tied round her middle, reaching from the bank.

  Anna Drake, reaching for me.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ‘There’s no sign of him below,’ Anna said, coming inside the summer house.

  I was wrapped in half the clothes from her travelling chest. Mathilda was wrapped in the other half, Mrs Williams’s fur hat low on her head, hiding her face. A fire burnt in the hearth and made the summer house’s damp steam. All I could smell was the river as we huddled close to the warmth. Mathilda hadn’t spoken since Anna had hauled us out of the water. I was just glad to see her breathing.

  I threw a length of wood onto the flames. The sight of it burning gave me some comfort. I wished to burn the whole of Trethevy to the ground. That way we might get out. Burnt, likely, but gone. Mrs Haskell had talked to me of women who did such things. She had known that I was one of them.

  Anna knelt beside me. ‘I think the river must have taken him out to sea.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  She frowned. ‘Both? What are you talking about?’

  So she had only seen the squire. The truth of how he had died could wait. There were other things to speak of first.

  ‘With him gone,’ I said, ‘we won’t know why he wanted rid of Gertrud and Mathilda so badly.’

  ‘Oh, I think we still might. I wouldn’t claim my German was particularly good but I made out enough, I think, to piece it together.’

  Anna plucked the hat from Mathilda’s head, showing her face. The girl’s plump cheeks were shiny with tears.

  ‘One word in particular I was able to make out,’ Anna said. ‘A word you said quite often to the squire, Mathilda. A word you used to beg for your life.’

  Mathilda let out a sob and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘What was it?’ I said.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘I think it’s about time you told us the truth, Mathilda, before anyone else comes to harm.’

  The girl shook her head and shuffled closer to the fire.

  ‘There’s nothing to be gained from your silence now,’ Anna said. ‘Gertrud is dead. The squire too, I should think.’

  I put my arm around Mathilda. She felt lumpy as a tree beneath all her layers, but still I felt her flinch.

  ‘You can trust us,’ I said, and hoped she would believe me.

  After a long pause, she spoke. ‘He … he said we must not come.’

  ‘The squire?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘My mother wrote him, he send her letters back. She was sad, of course, but she forgive him. He was young when they were married, she said. She love him too much, even though he took her money and we have nothing.’

  ‘The woman in the picture – that’s your mother?’

  Mathilda nodded, and used the fur hat to wipe her tears.

  ‘And you and Gertrud were sisters?’ I said.

  ‘Halfway sisters. Gertrud’s father died and then our mother met him, Mr Orton. He was not a Sir then. He was a Mr but she falls in love with him at a ball. They marry and I am born and then after a little time he leave her. He take the money Gertrud’s father left to our mother. She have only an allowance, very small, from an uncle. When she … when she died …’

  ‘The allowance stopped,’ Anna said. ‘And you had nothing.’

  ‘Gertrud say we must act. The house – we have no house. No money. We must make him help us. Gertrud say, our mother was a fool.’

  ‘So coming to England was Gertrud’s idea?’ Anna said.

  Mathilda nodded. ‘She says, he does not answer letters, we go ourselves. We have no money. We make him acknowledge me, his daughter. We go to Boscastle first, close to him but not too close. We will not beg, Gertrud say. We tell him we are there and he came then. Oh, he came at once!’

  She laughed, but it was a hollow laugh. She sounded so much older than I knew her to be.

  ‘He say then, we must go back to Germany. He owes us nothing. He has another wife, a title. He is man of law here. If people hear he marry this new wife when my mother was still living … Problems for him. I am problem. Not a daughter.’ She sniffed. ‘Gertrud offer him a bargain. If he give us money to live, we leave. But he say no, so Gertrud says, we come closer. We come to your house and we stay until you do what you must do.’

  ‘That’s why you stood outside the manor house most days,’ I said. ‘You were threatening him.’

  Mathilda smiled. ‘Gertrud, she very strong. She do not give up.’

  ‘Because she loved you,’ I said.

  ‘Because Mathilda was her means to survive,’ Anna said. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  The girl nodded, and there were no tears now. Only the cold, hard truth.

  ‘What happen here, to Gertrud … No one deserves to die like that. Her screams, I will hear them always. But I will not miss her. She had no love for me because I am my father’s daughter and she hate him. She did not want a sister. If my father had said yes, if he give her the money she ask for, what of me then, ah? She would leave me, like he left our mother? They are the same, though Gertrud could not see.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to be part of her plans any more. I know that makes you happy because your hand has stopped shaking. It stopped when she died, didn’t it?’

  ‘You see things, Shilly. Small things that are important. And you are right. I am free now. Free and poor and alone. I have nothing.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘You have us. If you want us, that is?’

  She gave a shy smile. ‘You have been kind as well as cruel, and I know the cruelty was for reason. To find Paul, and you did find him. You are good at heart.’

  I squeezed her hand, then turned to Anna. ‘So, we’ll leave this place together, won’t we? The three of us?’

  Anna said nothing for a moment, and I wondered at her cruelty in spurning poor Mathilda, in making the girl think she truly was alone. But then I saw that Anna’s eyes were wet, and that I had been wrong to think her cruel.

  ‘I was lost once,’ she said, so quietly her words were almost lost themselves. ‘If kind
ness hadn’t been offered me then, I might not be here now.’

  I thought of the scrap of felt, cut to make a duck, and tied to a little arm poking from a bundle of shawl. Of the butcher’s wife opening the door. Making a choice.

  ‘But you’re not lost any more, are you, Anna Drake?’ I said.

  ‘Indeed I’m not, Shilly-shally. And neither are you pair.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘There’s enough of a fug in here to pass out. Let’s have some air.’

  She opened the door and the sad song of the Trethevy birds came to us on the cool breeze. They were mourning one of their own, mourning she who had stirred them so, and in their cries was another loss, too. That of summer. The season had turned.

  ‘We must inform Lady Phoebe of what’s happened,’ Anna said, back to herself and back to business.

  I stood and gave Mathilda my hand to help her. ‘Up you come, then. We’ll go together—’

  ‘I don’t think that’s wise, Shilly.’

  ‘Why? Mathilda is safe now. She doesn’t have to stay hidden.’

  ‘It’s not Mathilda I’m thinking of. News of the squire’s death will be a great shock to Lady Phoebe, and we know she’s a fragile soul.’

  ‘The squire went on about it enough.’

  ‘And there’s the child to consider. The squire’s other child, still to arrive in this world. If we should bring to Lady Phoebe’s home the squire’s legitimate daughter, who knows what damage we might do?’

  ‘I will not hurt her,’ Mathilda said. ‘The badness – it was him. My father.’ She found that last word difficult to say, and not because it wasn’t in her own way of speaking, her German words. ‘When he came to Boscastle, he was afraid. That his new wife would die, and the child. That I believed. Of all his talk. He loved her, as my poor mother had loved him. None of this is the new wife’s fault.’

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ Anna said. ‘You’ll be quite safe here until we return.’

  Mathilda brightened. ‘I pack! I pack the case and then you come back and we go.’