The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  I was sickened hearing her talk of Peter and Paul as if she cared for them, she who had taken them from their families, risked their lives even if she didn’t outright kill them.

  ‘But it mattered not in the end,’ she said. ‘I have heard tell that Paul Haskell remembers nothing, that Peter has no clue who tried to take him. It was you and Saint Nectan saved the boys, Mrs Williams, saved them from the evil intentions of those foreign witches, one of whom got what she deserved. The other has scuttled away, back to the Devil. That is the belief in these parts. I think you’ll find it hard to make people think otherwise.’

  There was a clank of metal and she withdrew a tin box from the cabinet.

  ‘Now, Miss Drake. Your investigations are over, are they not?’

  ‘They are,’ Anna said quietly.

  ‘Anna, no! What are you doing? This is wrong!’

  ‘And they will not resume at any time,’ Lady Phoebe said. ‘You will assure me of that?’

  Anna nodded.

  ‘Good. Then the thirty pounds is—’

  ‘Three hundred,’ Anna said.

  I nearly fell over. Lady Phoebe, however, remained quite calm, her hand steady on the tin box.

  ‘For Mathilda to give up her claim on the squire’s estate,’ Anna said.

  ‘You will ensure that? My child must be the undisputed heir.’

  ‘I give you my word.’

  Lady Phoebe smiled, sly and cold. ‘It has been a pleasure to work with you, Miss Drake.’

  FORTY

  ‘How could you let her get away with it?’ I said as soon as we left the manor house. I hoped never to see that wretched place again as long as I lived.

  ‘You heard Lady Phoebe. We have no proof to condemn her in the eyes of the law. But there are other ways to punish those who deserve it.’

  I stopped. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘For all her bravado, her ladyship faces a future of uncertainty while Mathilda lives, and that is its own kind of prison. What’s to say Mathilda won’t make a claim on Trethevy? Not today, not next week, not even next month, but there is always the chance that she might.’

  ‘That will hang over Lady Phoebe,’ I said. ‘Her worry that her child will stay the heir, it’ll never leave her.’

  ‘And if she should receive an anonymous letter every now and then to remind her of the threat Mathilda poses, well. That will help to keep the matter uppermost in her thoughts.’

  ‘That will be us doing to Lady Phoebe what Gertrud did to the squire – threatening.’

  ‘I suppose it will,’ Anna said. ‘There is a certain neatness there.’

  Anna was grinning, but I was wary of her.

  ‘You gave Lady Phoebe your word,’ I said. ‘Does it mean nothing?’

  ‘Not to those who have done wrong.’

  ‘It’s a good thing the detectives didn’t want you if you’re not to be trusted.’

  ‘Sometimes life is not so black and white as you think it, Shilly.’

  I marched past her. ‘That’s all well and good for you to say, but you had no right to make such a bargain for Mathilda, to decide her future for her.’

  ‘Shilly, you might be able to see what others can’t, but you need to get better at listening to what people tell you. You’ll be no help to me otherwise.’

  ‘I heard what you just said to Lady Phoebe!’

  ‘And what about what Mathilda told us in the summer house, after I’d dragged you both from the river? She never wanted to be part of Gertrud’s scheme. She was used by Gertrud just as Mrs Haskell was used by Lady Phoebe. We’ve done Mathilda a good turn by getting her money to live on.’

  ‘We? That was you bargaining with a criminal, Anna. I had no part in it.’

  ‘You are part of this, Shilly. It’s you Mathilda wants to be with, that’s clear as day. And you’re with me so there we are. Complicit, to a degree.’

  Despite my anger, I felt a warm rush of pleasure. You’re with me.

  We had passed beneath the trees again, heading towards the quarry. Anna was speaking but her words flew by me and were gone, for I was listening to the trees. For the first time since we had come to Trethevy, there was peace. The trees were quiet. Wood, water, stone. Stillness in them all. No birds watched us pass.

  ‘Come on, Shilly-shally,’ Anna called. ‘I have a proposition to put to Mathilda that might make you happier. Don’t condemn me just yet.’

  I caught her up but felt no need to hurry, now that the path wasn’t going to change.

  I felt no more need to hurry when we reached the cottages. One cottage in particular, with a stinking man, a singing man, covered in fish oil and leering as we passed.

  ‘I’ve plenty today, my dears,’ Richard Bray shouted. ‘Come on in. Come on in for a sup.’

  Anna took my hand. ‘You mustn’t, Shilly. Please. It’ll kill you and I can’t—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were right, Anna. I don’t need it to see the strange parts of the world, to see things do as they didn’t ought to. I might want a sup, but that’s something different. When we were running to save Mathilda, I did what was needed and no drop had touched my lips.’

  She pulled me closer, so that our hips pressed together as we walked on. Richard Bray’s cries died away. My need didn’t die likewise, but Anna’s body next to mine would help me fight it. In time, it might leave me.

  ‘It looks like I have a new task, then,’ Anna said.

  ‘Another case?’

  ‘Of sorts. I can well imagine teaching you to read and write might prove to be mysterious.’

  ‘There is another mystery we must speak of first, Anna. The silk scrap we found just off the clearing.’

  ‘What of it?’ she said, with wariness.

  ‘You were sure it was Lady Phoebe’s means of hiding her face, that it explained away the blinded women I have felt to be in the woods. But she told us she didn’t use such a thing.’

  ‘We only have her word for that, Shilly.’

  ‘Why would she lie about it? What does she stand to gain when we know all the rest of it?’

  ‘To toy with us, to leave us wondering? Her arrogance is the most likely explanation, because if she didn’t wear that stocking as a mask, then …’

  ‘Then there was strangeness at work when I caught sight of Lady Phoebe’s face, when Peter saw it. She wasn’t all herself at that moment. The sisters who drowned the saint – they were here, Anna. In some half-being way. They were with Lady Phoebe. In her. In Gertrud, too, I suppose.’

  ‘You believe that Lady Phoebe and Gertrud were made a kind of sister to the other? Even though they weren’t bound by blood?’

  ‘It was the old story bound them,’ I said, ‘and their hate. Blood meant nothing to Gertrud – look at her meanness to Mathilda.’

  ‘But it meant everything to Lady Phoebe, trying to secure the rights of her unborn child.’

  ‘Well, that’s often the way with sisters, isn’t it? They fight. But the hate is done with now. That echo of the first pair, from the time of the saint, they’re gone. Back to wherever it is we go when we leave this world.’

  Anna shivered. ‘I hope there’s a better place when my time comes.’

  ‘The people here had good fortune, having someone to save them from such wickedness.’

  ‘When you say “someone”, I take it you’re not referring to my efforts in this case, or your own, Shilly?’

  ‘I mean Saint Nectan.’

  ‘I thought so. You still believe he was involved in what happened here? The bells. Paul’s survival under the summer house.’

  ‘Yes. And you believe different.’

  She swiped at a fern by way of answer.

  ‘Do you doubt he was ever here, in Trethevy?’ I said. ‘Even forever ago?’

  ‘Forever ago? Who can possibly know anything about then?’

  ‘You keep talking about these poets.’

  Anna laughed. ‘They have their part to pl
ay. Say there was a man here, in the distant past. Say he did good things in these woods, kindnesses, healing, and word spread, making those good deeds into something else, into miracles.’

  ‘And that made others come,’ I said. ‘They turned his house into a chapel.’

  ‘And built a monastery to worship in his name.’

  ‘And at the end of his days he was drowned, by a pair of sisters who knew only hatred.’

  ‘If any of it is true,’ Anna said, ‘then perhaps that last part is as likely as the rest of it. Which is to say unlikely. Saint Nectan is a myth, Shilly. A story.’

  ‘Or the truth.’

  ‘Or something in between.’

  ‘Isn’t that why I gave up milking cows,’ I said, ‘to help you with the in between?’

  ‘Partly,’ she said.

  We found Mathilda on the shelf overlooking the waterfall. She was wearing Mr Williams’s boxy black coat but the sleeves were a little short. I caught a glimpse of the scratches Mrs Haskell had given her. The flesh was beginning to heal, at last.

  We sat down with her, and Anna told her what had passed between us and Lady Phoebe.

  When Anna had finished, Mathilda said nothing for a little while. She stared out at the water where she had so nearly died. As had I.

  ‘If he had known her better, his new wife,’ Mathilda said, ‘he might have got what he so wanted.’

  ‘He certainly underestimated her,’ Anna said.

  ‘And paid for it with his life,’ I added.

  Mathilda stood. ‘And now the wife has what she wants. The name, the land, the child.’

  ‘You are not left with nothing, Mathilda. But there is a condition to the money. You must leave here.’

  ‘That is what I want! I never want to be here. Is Gertrud’s doing, all of it. I go. I take the money.’

  ‘Three hundred pounds is a fine sum,’ Anna said, ‘but it won’t last forever. It would be wise to invest the money to produce an income.’

  I smiled. Here was Anna’s talent.

  ‘Yes,’ Mathilda said. ‘I must do that. To make the money last.’

  ‘It just so happens that Shilly and I are looking for investors.’

  Mathilda’s eyes widened.

  ‘We’re setting up an enterprise,’ Anna said. ‘An agency, for detection. Do you know this word? De-tec-shun.’

  I went inside and packed up the last of our things.

  We were ready to leave the woods just after midday, deciding to take the longer way back to the road, it being the easier path with Anna’s case. Our going was unnoticed by all but one.

  From the magpie tree, a bird watched us cross the clearing. A large bird, with feathers of the deepest black. The most knowing of all Trethevy birds. I knew who it was, of course, because I knew her true self as well as I knew my own.

  ‘Come on if you’re coming, Shilly-shally,’ Anna called.

  ‘What is this, this “Shilly-shally”?’ Mathilda asked her.

  I didn’t catch Anna’s answer as they slipped beneath the trees and so to the road, the sea. The rest of our lives.

  I looked back at the bird. Did she know where we were bound?

  It was the going that mattered.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The characters in The Magpie Tree are fictional. So is their story, but like the twisting roots of the trees of Trethevy, it goes deep into the earth of that place – earth that’s rich with tales.

  I first came across ‘The Ladies of St Nectan’s Glen’ in Daphne du Maurier’s book Vanishing Cornwall. I was fifteen and learning, for the first time, the stories that belonged to the part of the world in which I lived: north Cornwall. A place of bleak moorland and dangerous coasts. A place visitors drive through on their way to the softer, easier landscapes of the south. A place I loved, and continue to love to this day, though I haven’t lived there for a good while now.

  Du Maurier recounts the story of a mysterious pair of women who set up home in woodland near Boscastle. No one knows who they are. They speak a strange language. One day, someone spies through the window of the women’s cottage and sees that one of them has died. Her companion is distraught but will not speak. The dead woman is taken away for burial, as is decent, and her companion remains in the cottage, wasting away, until one day she is found very still in her chair before the fire. Her hand hangs close to the floor, as if she is reaching for the handkerchief that has fallen there. But her hand will never reach the handkerchief: the poor creature is dead. And the cause? A broken heart. No one is any the wiser as to why the women came to the woods.

  The image of the hand reaching for the handkerchief has stayed with me for almost twenty years. I have carried it around with me, trusting that, at some point, I would find the women’s story. Along the way, a second image has joined it: a boy who traps rabbits, running into the trees. Where he came from, where he was running to, I didn’t know. Until I came to know Anna and Shilly.

  Following the trail of the story backwards from du Maurier made me feel, at times, as if I was that boy, but instead of snaring my prey I was instead falling down the rabbit hole, getting lost in a maze of tales and trees. Even the name of the place didn’t stay the same. The spot now known as St Nectan’s Glen has been, since the eighteenth century, Nathan’s Cave, Trevillet Vale, St Knighton’s Kieve, Glen Nectan, Glen Neot, St Kynance Keeve, and even the Haunted Valley, to name a few of its titles. It is a place that shifts about, and writers have had a hand in this shiftiness.

  Trethevy has long been popular with visiting writers who have retold old stories about the place, and written new ones over them, into them. Anna isn’t wrong when she claims that poets are responsible for the legends. A useful guide to the development of the stories, and the changing identity of the place as a result, is Sidney Joseph Madge who produced two excellent guides to the area: Legends of Trevillet Glen and Waterfall (1914) and The ‘Chapel’, Kieve and Gorge of ‘Saint Nectan’, Trevillet Millcombe, Tintagel (1950).

  Madge makes clear that it’s Robert Stephen Hawker, parson of nearby Morwenstow parish, famous eccentric and not-quite-so-famous poet, who has had the greatest influence on what is now known as St Nectan’s Glen. Hawker first visited the area in 1823, on his honeymoon, and in 1832 he published Records of the Western Shore, which included the poem ‘The Sisters of the Glen’. The opening line sets the action at ‘Nathan’s mossy steep’, and the poem goes on to recount the story much as du Maurier tells it.

  Hawker revised this poem several times during his lifetime, and the different versions he published changed the name Nathan to Neot and then to Nectan. But though Cornwall has plenty of early Christian saints of its own, Nectan isn’t one of them. His home has always been Hartland in Devon, and I have drawn on the Reverend Gilbert H. Doble’s work St Nectan, number 45 in his series on Cornish saints (1940), for the Nectan of The Magpie Tree.

  St Nectan’s lack of Cornish connections didn’t stop Hawker’s myth-making. In a note attached to the poem in the collection The Quest of the Sangraal, published in 1864, Hawker claimed that a pleasure house that overlooked the Trethevy waterfall, built in 1820 but by that time in disrepair, was in fact St Nectan’s hermitage. Madge notes that the Ordnance Survey subsequently marked ‘the hermitage’ on the map, where it still appears today (see OS Explorer 111). The story has reshaped the land it sprang from, much like the River Duwy that has carved its way through the valley, fashioning and then destroying numerous ‘kieves’ (plunge pools or basins in Cornish) on its way to the sea.

  And the stories run on likewise. Du Maurier’s main source was Wilkie Collins’ entertaining travelogue Rambles Beyond Railways, first published in 1851, which also informed my first novel, although on a very different subject: fishing. The Magpie Tree has had me circle back to old sources, old stories. Having been to Tintagel Castle, Collins decides to take in ‘Nighton’s Kieve’ and the famous waterfall, but on arriving at the valley he finds ‘one compact mass of vegetation entirely filling it’. The lack of a path
means Collins has to fight his way through trees, which possess ‘a living power of opposition’, much like the enchanted woods of Sleeping Beauty. His antipathy for Trethevy’s flora finds its way into Shilly’s distrust of thicketyness. In his hunt for the waterfall, Collins stumbles across ‘the damp, dismantled stone walls of a solitary cottage’, and here he learns the tale of the former inhabitants who spoke ‘a mysterious and diabolic language of their own’.

  When du Maurier visited the Glen herself in the course of writing Vanishing Cornwall, the then-owner informed her that the ladies of the story were, in fact, St Nectan’s sister-assistants, and this echoes Robert Hunt’s retelling of the story in ‘St Nectan’s Kieve and the Lonely Sisters’, first published in his Popular Romances of the West of England (1865). Du Maurier also draws on A Londoner’s Walk to the Land’s End and a Trip to the Scilly Isles by Walter White (1865), which I found very useful for descriptions of mid-nineteenth-century Boscastle.

  Those familiar with St Nectan’s Glen today will no doubt realise I have refashioned the landscape for my own purposes; the quarry, in particular, is a substantial addition to the woods. In this I’m following in the tradition of those who have gone before me. I like to think Hawker would approve.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my agent, Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge and White, for great faith.

  Thanks to my editor extraordinaire, Lesley Crooks, and to Susie Dunlop, Daniel Scott, Kelly Smith and all at Allison & Busby.

  Thanks to my mum and dad, who are always keen on research trips, even in the rain.

  Thanks to my readers: Katy Birch, Tim Major, Hannah Ormerod and Kate Wright.

  Thanks to Dave, without whom I’d still be at Lanlary Rock, wondering where to go next.

  Today, Boscastle is home to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic: an extraordinary treasure trove of materials relating to matters of the occult in Cornwall and further afield. The protection charms that feature in The Magpie Tree are based on objects held in the museum, and the novel also includes some of the practices of the Boscastle witches, which the museum displays explore.