The house was quiet or seemed it. There in the shadows Robert and I welcomed one another with kisses and such delight that we were lost in one another and unaware of danger.
Casson dragged me from Robert’s arms and flung me into the mud, striking me hard across the face and splitting my lip. He flew at Robert, and they fought, the whole house, Betty, Mistress Casson, John, all coming out to see how Casson raised his hand to Robert again and again, for although Robert is now seventeen, Casson is practised in violence and Robert is not. And I was so afraid, for I have seen Henry Casson murder a man with my own eyes, and I feared that he might do so again.
The words, the foul and ungodly words he spoke to Robert, who he called a bastard, and a heathen cur, not fit for Christian life. And me he called a whore, and a witch. Robert lay bloody on the floor, no one daring to go to him for fear of angering Casson. The fiend grabbed my hair and marched me down the lane and told me I was cast out of Ponden Hall and told me that I may never cross the threshold there ever again and expect to survive. Last I saw of my beloved was Casson dragging him into the house, the mistress screaming, and all was done.
It took me several minutes to find the resolve to stand, as the pain in my ribs and face was most severe. Finally, I went to the back door, thinking Betty would hide me, or at least give me my cloak and shoes. But Casson was there in the kitchen and no sign of Robert. I watched through the window as he towered over Betty, his fist in her face, and did not need to hear what was said to know how he threatened her. All these years, since I outgrew my usefulness, he must have wanted rid of me, keeping me on only because he had no choice. To put me out on such a night as that, with bare feet and thin clothes, would kill me, and he knew it.
There was little that could be done, so I stole down to the bee boles, where the hives are stored and honey collected. There was a little shelter to be had, the bees being now quiet for the winter. I dare not move a bole, for fear of angering the slumbering creatures, so I gathered what branches, moss and heather I might and covered myself with a thick blanket of plants, as if I were lying down to die in my own grave. I prayed all night to God our Saviour to deliver me from this evil, this murderer. The sin that I have committed is of not having spoken up of what I knew. First too afraid of Casson’s wrath, and then afraid that Robert would cast me out for allowing such a foul man to take over his family. But I have not sinned, not in my heart or soul. Robert and I are good and pious people who only do what is right. And yet it is Henry Casson who prospers, Henry Casson who abuses, beats, threatens and kills those who should be respected and loved, and I pray to God to show me why such men are not punished as they should be. I do not know if it was the branches or a deep and furious anger that kept me alive that night, only that I saw the dawn rise, and when I went out to the lane, I saw Betty looking for me. She had a basket, my cloak and shoes, some food. She sent me to stay with her brother, a weaver, in Haworth, and it is there I am now, ever grateful for her kindness.
If there were but a way to tell the truth of Casson’s most odious Sin against the commandments of Our Lord, without losing my Robert, then I would tell it aloud, and then Henry Casson, Constable of Haworth, would find himself on the end of the rope.
But I may not speak of it. I may not ever say what I know, for how can I when my heart is in the hands of the son of the man he murdered?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘Where’s Ma?’ I ask Will, who’s curled up under Mab, staring into the fire.
‘She said she’d gone to talk to some bees …’ Will wrinkled his nose up. ‘I’m tired; can I go to bed? Can Mab come too?’
‘Of course.’ I sit down and stroke Mab’s silky ears.
For a split-second, Kodak-coloured moment, I see Mum telling the bees that Dad had died, laying them out a plate of funeral food, and leaving a glass of honey wine balanced in the grass.
‘Don’t you touch that,’ she’d told me when she’d spied me watching her. ‘If we don’t honour the bees, they’ll come for one of us next, maybe even you.’
‘I put a shepherd’s pie in the oven,’ I tell him. ‘You must be hungry.’
‘I’m too tired to eat,’ he says. ‘I just want to go to sleep.’
‘OK,’ I say, careful not to fuss too much. ‘Can we just talk a little bit first?’
He shrugs again and sighs, settling his face into Mab’s fur.
‘I only want to say I am sorry. So sorry about everything you have been through. The worst thing has happened. Everything you are feeling, everything you are thinking, I get it, I understand. It all makes perfect sense, to feel the way you do. I promise you that I will keep working until I’ve made a life for us that you feel safe in.’
He sucks in his lower lip and chews on it for a moment, before turning to look at me.
‘Are you sure you looked as hard as you could for Daddy?’
I’m silent for a moment, because although this is a question I have asked myself again and again, I still don’t have an answer.
‘When I got to the camp that Daddy had been working in, I saw all the miles and miles of rainforest they needed to search. They had an idea of where the plane might have gone down, but it was impossible to look for him on foot, and from the air, the canopy was so thick that they had to look very closely for any sign of a crash. The official search plane looked for two weeks. Then me and the families of the other people on the plane, we found pilots and paid them to look again and again. There was always one of us on the plane, too. I went up several times. When you were up, it was like flying over an ocean of trees, so thick and deep you hardly saw the forest floor, all this green only separated by the great bend of the river. But still we looked and looked, hoping for a glimpse of something. Me and another lady, whose son was on the plane, we chartered a boat that took us downriver to as close to where they thought the plane went down as we could, and it was so hot and damp, it was like breathing in steam. For a week, our guides took us into the forest. We could hardly see more than a few feet in front of us at any time, but we looked as much as we could. And the noise … the rainforest is a very noisy place.’ I hesitate, remembering the feeling of defeat and exhaustion I’d felt when I’d boarded my flight back to the UK. As the plane ascended I’d stared out of the window until we’d banked up through the clouds, still looking until the land was out of sight. ‘Will, I think I did look as hard as I could for Daddy. I think I did. I tried my best.’
‘Daddy will come home,’ Will says after a moment. ‘I know he will.’
Closing my eyes for a moment, I think of that light on the moor, soft and slight, that led me to Will’s hiding place.
‘I love Daddy so much, Will,’ I tell him. ‘Wherever he is, that doesn’t change. And he loves us too, he will always love us, and I think … I think we will always know that, always feel it. I think I felt it tonight, felt him looking out for us. He’s lost – but not to us. Do you see what I mean? We will always have him.’
Will is quiet, and he shakes his head.
‘I don’t think that was Daddy.’ He speaks just above a whisper.
‘What do you mean? Don’t think what was Daddy?’
‘Who helped us in the dark.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
‘It’s just …’ He hesitates, as if he might get into trouble for speaking up. ‘She told me there was danger, she said it wasn’t safe. That Greybeard was coming.’
‘Don’t listen to her!’ I sit up, instantly furious. ‘She’s got no right to tell you to keep secrets from me. Granny is a very silly old woman.’
Will shakes his head and his hand reaches out and steals into mine.
‘Not Granny,’ he whispers, leaning in very close to me. ‘The girl who sits at the end of my bed and tells me stories when you are asleep. You used to know her when you were my age; the red girl. She says the bad one is coming.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Will sleeps and I watch him for a while, my back against the bookshelves. I watch the s
weep of his lashes, the rise and fall of his arm tracking the rise and fall of Mab’s steady breathing. It’s impossible to translate how I feel about him into coherent thoughts. The adrenalin of fearing him lost has begun to ebb away, leaving me trembling with exhaustion.
Lying there watching him, I know that there will be no scenario where I lose him, because I simply won’t allow it. I’ll defy God and the Devil to always keep him safe. His is a life that I will never, never give up on; that is the only certain thing I have ever been sure of.
As small and as vulnerable as he is, he is brave. And as sad as he is, he is hopeful. I have always thought of him as invincible, but this girl he is talking about, dreaming about – imagining. This isn’t like him, to see figures in shadows, or hear voices where there are none. Is this his grief, his fear, manifesting itself? Or is it something more? I have never told him about my imaginary friend or Greybeard. If Ma has …
I try hard to remember the imaginary girl I used to play with when I was small. In my mind’s eyes she is another version of me at that age, a mirror image I invented to feel less isolated. Try as I might, I can’t picture her. I think of her and I see the colour red, like a flame, always moving around her. It can’t be the same girl, of course it can’t, and yet …
Very slowly, very quietly, I ease myself to my feet, opening one of the doors of the bookcase, to find the cold white pale face of one of Ma’s old china dolls staring back at me.
Cursing under my breath as her blank black eyes stare right through me, I move her to one side, taking out a handful of fat paperbacks. Stacking them up to prop the bedroom door open, I return downstairs.
Ma is already in her chair. She has drawn it a little closer to the warmth of the fire, and all I can see of her is her bed socks and her hands on the armrests.
‘Are you warm enough?’ I ask her, building the fire once again.
‘Your pie is in the kitchen, still warm.’
‘Oh, I forgot about that. I’m not really hungry.’
Ma is silent; she doesn’t want to talk any more, but there are questions I need to ask her.
‘Ma, do you remember my imaginary friend?’
She doesn’t answer. Seconds pass and I watch the new logs slowly begin to glow and catch fire.
‘Ma? Do you remember her? There was a time when I used to play with her all the time, and Dad got a bit worried about me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ma says. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘Will just told me that there’s a girl that sits on the end of his bed and tells him stories. He said she told him the bad one is coming.’
Ma sits forward in her chair, her face emerging out of the dark.
‘Did she say when?’
This isn’t the response I was expecting.
‘No … Today was hard,’ I say. ‘You were worried.’
‘I don’t suppose I’ve a right to be,’ Ma says. ‘The older I get, the more I realise what I have lost. The boy, he’s the first person I’ve met in a long time who … cares for me.’
‘Ma …’ I try to find words to counter her, but in the end she is right. I left her alone for sixteen years.
‘I shouldn’t worry too much,’ she says. ‘He’s got a lot on his plate. And kids, they feel things deeper than we do, see the world like it really is, before their minds get hardened and set and there’s no room for fairies any more. And as sure as eggs is eggs, death will come back to Ponden some day.’
‘So you think he has made friends with a ghost, then? You think I did? Is that what you’re saying?’
Ma simply shrugs.
‘Who? The Ponden Child?’ I ask, feeling the night creep into my bones.
‘No, the child can’t get in,’ Ma says. ‘Poor little wretch is trapped out there all alone. I don’t know who she is. But there was no sign of her after you left until the day you came back. There’s something in you she is attracted to, and Will as well, I suppose.’
‘Ma, you’re kind of freaking me out. I mean, these are just stories; you get that, right?’
Ma shakes her head. ‘You asked me what I thought and I told you. Pay me no mind if you don’t like what I’ve got to say.’
Drawing a little closer to the fire, I watch the flames leap and repeat, and try to make sense of this feeling of disquiet. We’ve lost so much, all of us at Ponden. We’ve all lost so much that we are raw to touch; even the air around us hurts sometimes. It has to be that which makes the shadows grow longer, the imaginations of a half-asleep child become solid, the stories of a woman who has lived alone for so long. That’s all it is, that’s all it is …
What I need to do is make amends, find a path between Ma and me that we can both navigate somehow, even after all the hurt we inflicted on one another.
‘Ma, when I was taking the carpet out of Cathy’s room I found something incredible … I haven’t told anyone about it yet because it’s so amazing, but I want to tell you.’
‘What is it, lass?’
A crash sounds from above with such force it shakes the dust from the ceiling, sending cracks shooting through the plasterwork. And then the sound of something like footsteps running, pounding, follows at once, across the ceiling and then down the walls and through the room.
‘Will!’ Racing up the stairs I charge into the dark that waits at the top and stop dead in my tracks.
The bedroom door is shut, the books that were acting as a doorstop flung in different directions along the length of the hallway.
A furious barking starts on the other side of the door, high-pitched and insistent. I can hear Mab frantically scratching at the door, desperate to be out. Grabbing the latch, I try to open the door, but it’s jammed, as if someone is pushing against it from the other side.
‘Will!’ I call out. ‘What’s going on? Open the door! Open the door!’
‘Help me!’ The call is so full of anguish, it hardly sounds like him. Pain explodes into my shoulder as I run hard against the door, but it holds firm.
‘Please, dear God, help me!’ His voice is so twisted with pain and fright it is unrecognisable, morphing into a language that I have never heard before stopping midway through a phrase or word.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming, Will!’ I shout, charging at the door again, my eyes widening as it swings open of its own accord a second before I would have made contact.
Mab shoots out past me and down the stairs, and I tumble into the room, sprawling on the carpet. For just a few seconds I think I hear a baby’s plaintive cry, somewhere in the room or outside? But it fades almost at once, so quickly I’m not sure I heard it at all. My eyes adjust to the light and I push myself up to check my son.
He is sleeping peacefully in bed, his covers undisturbed, and when I rest my cheek on his chest his breathing is even, and his face is dry of tears. The room is perfectly still, utterly peaceful.
And then I see the only thing that is out of place, the china doll I shut back behind the bookshelf door. Now she is sitting on the end of Will’s bed, watching me.
‘What’s happening?’ Ma calls breathlessly from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Is he OK?’
With some effort I scoop Will up in his blanket and carry him, still slumbering, downstairs. He doesn’t wake once as I tuck him onto the sofa. Ma turns her chair to face him.
‘He was asleep when I got in,’ I whisper, watching his face in the firelight. ‘But the door was jammed. I couldn’t get in and I thought I heard—’
‘Crying out,’ Ma says. ‘You did, I did. I heard a scream, too. And I heard the footsteps, the crash … And I heard a baby crying … you heard it too, didn’t you?’ Ma’s thin face is as pale as dawn snow.
‘I heard it too, Ma,’ I say. ‘It could have been that he had a nightmare and came out of it before I reached him. Maybe we heard farm cats fighting, or foxes calling.’
‘But it weren’t that, were it, Tru,’ Ma says, looking up at the ceiling.
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, Ma, it weren’t that.’
&nb
sp; And there is a name that comes to mind. The name of a girl whose story is only just coming to light after centuries of obscurity. Agnes.
PART THREE
There let thy bleeding branch atone
For every torturing tear.
Shall my young sins, my sins alone,
Be everlasting here?
Emily Brontë
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ma sits at the table, looking at the pieces of paper side by side, listening as I tell her how I discovered them.
‘You found those here? Down the floorboards, under that old carpet?’
I nod. ‘Yes, and I think they’ve been there at least a hundred years, judging by the last layers of papers that I found, and very easily many more. Was there ever any talk of this girl, Agnes? Anything in the family stories? I’m sure Dad never mentioned her to me.’
Ma thinks for a moment.
‘Your dad talked to you more about this stuff than me,’ she says. ‘I always felt a Heaton by marriage isn’t really a Heaton.’
I watch as, sitting with her hands in her lap, she peers at the extracts but doesn’t attempt to touch them, or even lean in a little closer to see them.
‘That’s not true, Ma,’ I say softly. ‘Dad was always trying to include you in things. You never wanted to … be with us.’
Ma looks at me, and I’m surprised to see the hurt in her eyes.
‘That’s how you remember it?’ she asks me.
‘That’s how it was, when I think about my life here as a child. There was me and Dad, or there was me. You were always in another room.’
‘It felt like you wanted me in another room. You two were so close and I was … cut off, I suppose. I built a wall around myself when things got bad with your dad, but I never meant to shut you out, too.’ She lowers her gaze to the papers again. ‘And you think that might really be by Emily Brontë?’
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