“Oh, yes – beautiful!”
“Mind you—”
“I know.”
“That dress!”
“I know.”
“Mum, will school be open today?”
Connie lit another cigarette from the stub of the one she was smoking. “You’ve heard about her and that Max Quinn, I suppose?”
There was a slight hesitation before my mother said, “Yes, flaunting it to all and sundry an’ all. Apparently they were in th’ Danby Chronicle last week – pair of ’em grinning like Cheshire cats.”
Connie tapped the end of her cigarette ash into a saucer. “It’s a disgrace.”
“Ooh, it is an’ all - carrying on with a married man.”
“I’ll say! And he’s been seen in th’ village with ’er, you know?”
“Mum, will we be able to get to school?”
Mum, who’d been clearing away the dishes up to that point, plonked herself opposite Connie and poured out a cup of tea, spooning sugar in –one-two-three – stirring and stirring, tapping the side of the cup with the spoon while the atmosphere fair crackled with anticipation, notably from my corner. Eventually she said, “His wife must know, mustn’t she? What with him carrying on like that right in front of her nose—”
“She’d have to be blind not to, Viv.” Connie took a deep drag on her cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs, then tilted her head back and blew it out in a long plume – all with the elbow of one arm balancing on the palm of the other – just like Lauren Bacall.
I thought, watching her, that when I grew up I’d do it just like that – smoke like a film star. Not that Connie Gibbs looked like a film star, far from it. Although only in her mid-forties she was already what my dad called an old busybody, spending her days dressed like a battle axe in rollers. Pink the rollers were, with one pinned to the very front peeping out of her headscarf. Sometimes she would still have her face cream on from the night before, and most of her teeth were missing at the sides. ‘Probably just as well Jack’s as vacant as a Blackpool guest house in winter’, Dad used to say, ‘with her for a missus. Bloody hell, a bloke needs nourishment not punishment.’
Jack had never been the same since returning from the Second World War. At his happiest in The Quarryman playing snooker or digging over his vegetable patch, Jack Gibbs wore the haunted eyes of a traumatised soldier, had been signed off work for the foreseeable, and spent a good deal of time staring at something no one else could see. He was also in possession of a hearing aid, although he rarely used it. Dad and Jack were good friends. The pair of them had rigged up the scullery at the back, with our lean-to being the envy of the street. I found out many years later they’d drilled holes using an iron-hot poker, nicked the piping and somehow fashioned a two-way electric switch. Perhaps it was because they’d been in the war together but I do remember them being very close.
“He drives a very smart car, have you seen? Mind you, apparently…” My mother glanced over at the three of us sitting quietly eating toast with our ears swivelling like radar dishes, and annoyingly lowered her voice, “He used to sell knickers in Leek before—”
“Mum! Will I be going to school?” I shouted.
My mother put her tea-cup down with a clatter. “Louise, what have I told you about butting-in to adult conversations?”
“What are you going to do with them today, Viv?”
“Oh, they’ll be going to school,” said Mum. “Soon as th’ road’s cleared.”
They made sure we got to school in those days – every single day – even if we had to sit at the desks by candlelight in coats and scarves. And that particular morning a whole load of trouble was taken to make damn sure we were educated. The local farmer fetched Miss by tractor. She was late and by the time she arrived there was a queue outside in the yard, not to mention a snowball fight and several bloody noses. Then it turned out the boiler had broken but that was no barrier, either; lessons were to be given using oil lamps and we sat around a paraffin stove to keep warm, taking it in turns to read out loud.
By mid-morning, however, the day began to darken once more and fresh flakes of snow fluttered from the sky. Jumping up, we ran to the window. “It’s snowing! Look everyone, it’s snowing!”
It stuck and slid down window panes; softly, silently, icing the skeletal boughs of the shivering trees; and quickly covered the tracks that had only just been cleared until they were white-over once more. Not a single car passed either in or out of the village that day – a situation, although we didn’t know it that would last for nearly a month more.
Finally, at three o’clock in another wave of Arctic conditions, Arthur, Iddy and I formed a chain with me in the middle, heads down – sopping mittens gripping sopping mittens – for the slippery tramp home along School Lane and down to Moody Street. The other kids had been sliding and every few steps one us would slam hard to the ground, and once you were down you got pelted with snowballs from the gang behind. My coat, hat, scarf and hair were matted with snow; my face and ears freezing pink; hips and knees bruised. Cold like that never really leaves you; locking into a childhood bank of terror along with dark cellars, ghosts and creaking wardrobe doors.
Bursting in through the back door half an hour later we were grateful to see there was a fire going and ran straight to it.
“Don’t drop your wet things on the floor. Take your coats off and hang them up properly.”
In our eagerness to get to the warmth we didn’t immediately register the fact that Mum was home unusually early. Normally we let ourselves in and lit the fire. But after a few moments it became clear something had happened.
I remember the clothes horse to one side of the fire and steam coming off the wet clothes. And that tea had been laid out for us already; that the aunties were sitting there smoking. But there was something else different too. The wireless was on. Normally that was a treat reserved for Saturday nights when we listened to Valentine Dyal and Saturday Night Theatre.
“Quiet now!” My mother snapped. “There’s been an incident and we need to listen.”
“Mum, what’s an incident?”
Auntie Flo and Auntie Connie looked grave.
“Who is it? Did you catch as who it was?” said Auntie Flo, in a low, shocked sort of voice.
My mother, ear to the wireless, shook her head impatiently.
“Mum, what’s an incident?”
She turned up the volume. “Shush, Louise. A woman’s gone missing. Quiet!”
“Who’s gone missing?”
“Shush, Louise!”
I didn’t understand what the man with the clipped, urgent sounding voice was saying, but after he’d finished, she switched the wireless off and said, “Well, I never!”
“What?” I said. “What’s happened?”
“Who’s gone missing?” Arthur said.
“’Ou’d ’ave ’ad a devil of a job in weather like that,” said Auntie Flo.
“’Ou must be dead. ’Ou’s got to be.”
My mother never spoke the local dialect in front of us. She’d been educated at Danby Grammar along with Auntie Marion and Auntie Rosa. The only time she ever used it was to her ‘coven’ as dad called them, and even then only if she thought we weren’t listening. So this, instinct told me, must be very serious indeed.
“What do you mean by, ‘dead,’ Mum?”
“’Er might’ve holed up somewhere and then–” said Auntie Connie.
“It were raw out,” said Auntie Flo. “Nobody could survive that. Even Crocker up there on th’ moors. God knows how he survives at th’ best of times, I dunna.”
Mum was standing by the back window now, looking out at the yard with a hand over her mouth, just staring, talking as if to herself. “I knew it. I said…Didn’t I? I said—”
“Mum, what do you mean by ‘dead’?”
Abruptly, she swung round. “Louise, go to the table and eat your tea. All of you, get your tea eaten this instant.”
We didn’t have to be told
twice.
“No more than three slices and that’s all the dripping we’ve got. Then you can get ready for bed, Louise. Arthur and Iddy - get your chores done and then you can go too.”
It was four o’clock.
***
I was bawling my eyes out being packed off to bed so early, but Arthur and Iddy were sent up soon after so that helped.
The bedroom was like an igloo and dark already. The only form of light came from the dazzling white expanse outside. It seemed to shine through the curtains like a full moon. And although a watermark had stained the flocked wallpaper from decades of damp, a new high tide was reached that night. Snow spattered and flurried against the window pane and icy water drip-drip-dripped from the guttering. Sparsely furnished, there was one large, old walnut wardrobe between the three of us and a matching chest of drawers – a relic from better days, said my mother – and an old cast-iron fireplace with a tiny grate. The flue was blocked with birds’ nests, which was why it wasn’t lit, and so the only way to keep warm was to put a heated brick in the bed and then stay there.
Arthur, trailing up behind me, boots clomping up the wooden stairs, angrily threw the cloth-wrapped brick into the bed. “Four o’bloody clock in the bloody afternoon,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to swear, our Arthur,” Iddy said.
“Shuddup, you.”
Iddy and Arthur were always fighting. And they kicked and punched each other in bed too with me getting the occasional stray fist. “Stop it, you two.”
“Shuddup, Louise.”
“Yeah, shuddup, Louise.”
Despite Iddy always arguing and fighting with Arthur, he still copied him and ganged up on me whenever he got the chance.
“Ah, look, now she’s crying. Cry-baby, Louise!”
A sudden thump sounded on the ceiling from the floor below. Mum with her broom handle. “Be quiet up there. Get to bed this minute or your father will be up when he gets home and then…”
We jumped in fully dressed, fighting over the warm bit where the brick had settled.
After a few minutes, Arthur said, “I’m not a bit bloody tired.”
“I’m not,” said Iddy.
“I’m not,” I said. “Who is it who’s gone missing anyway? I don’t understand why we’ve got to go to bed just because someone’s gone missing.”
“It’s because of th’ weather,” Arthur said. “Nobody could survive out there.They’re saying a woman’s dead. She’d ’ave frozen to death.”
“But who?”
“All blue and purple with icicles hanging out of her nose,” said Iddy.
“What do you mean, frozen to death?” I wanted to know. “And who’s Crocker?”
“It means she’s turned into ice but when she gets warmed up her skin cracks and then her eyes snap open, and then she grabs you by the neck with her long, bony fingers and then she sucks out your blood so she can live again and then she turns into a vampire and then—”
“Shuddup, Iddy,” said Arthur.
“And her eyes are all red and she comes for children at night when they’re asleep—”
“Shuddup, yer cloth ’ead or I’ll punch yer.”
They started fighting again after that, but I must have fallen asleep because I don’t remember anything else from that night. Just the stillness; an air of something bad having happened, a sadness, and that in some way it was connected to us.
It was to be a long time yet, though – well, three weeks to be precise – before any of us found out what it was. And even then we had difficulty believing it.
***
Chapter Eleven
1908
Annie Bailey
Annie Bailey wandered away from Castle Draus where the crowd still lingered excitedly, and began to pick her way across the moors towards Gallows Hill, from where she would make her way down to the old church.
Watched by her two daughters, Agnes and Ellen, she cut a solitary figure, with long, black Victorian skirts flying around her like the ragged wings of a raven. Although mourning for the late Queen Victoria had long since passed, Annie had embraced the fashion in all its gothic darkness and kept it, wearing well the sombre memory of death and perhaps relishing the wariness she elicited. You didn’t cross Annie Bailey, came the whispered advice. There was little, if any, evidence to substantiate this fear, but generally speaking people heeded the warning; intuition cautioning against eye contact. There was something, they said, strange and unsettling about the sallow-skinned widow who lived on the edge of the moors with her two daughters.
No one quite knew where Annie originally hailed from. She had exceptionally dark eyes and jet-black hair shot through with an auburn streak – in marked contrast to that of local folk with their wan, weather-beaten complexions and predominantly light brown or fair hair. Small and wiry, her facial features were also unusual, being in possession of a hawkish beak of a nose, underneath which her thin lips sneered and twitched at the slightest vexation. Local history suggested one of two possible theories as to her lineage. Either she was of Saracen descent – it was well known that local men had fought in the Crusades and returned with Arab captives who had then gone on to farm the land – or she’d arrived with a family of Romanian gypsies. Either way, with a muscular, sinewy physique and long, bony fingers, she was both a capable worker and a gifted healer. She had always found work and never shied from it.
Twenty-three years she had been here now, arriving in Ludsmoor already pregnant with Agnes, from who knew quite where? At the time the village gossip had been vicious and the ungodly woman shunned; but a local man, a widowed sheep farmer by the name of Jed Bailey, had stunned the entire community by marrying her within weeks of her arrival, resolutely claiming the child as his own.
Tongues sharpened. ‘Had the foreigner not been with child when she first came here? Had they not all clapped eyes on her at least five months gone and maybe more? It was a scandal. And she’d been seen selling ribbons and buttons at the roadside, no better than a common gypsy beggar. Yet here she was on a wet miserable day in January, just back from Leek Register Office clutching Jed Bailey’s arm, and didn’t she look like the cat that got the cream? Now a respectable farmer’s wife with her own cottage on Wish Lane, was she? Well, she could think again because they’d be buggered if they invited that one in for tea and biscuits, and that was a fact.’
A quiet fury gripped the village: Jed Bailey, a handsome, strong-boned man with a thriving farm, had been widowed for less than a year. It wasn’t decent. And besides, there were far more deserving and considerably prettier women in the village. Scurrying past her in the street with their heads down, local women managed to pretend for years that she didn’t exist. Where had the strange-looking incomer hailed from anyway? Blown in on an ill-wind that was for sure.
A year later, though, Annie bore another child – this one fair and as different to little Agnes as it was possible to be. Where the first girl mirrored her mother in looks, the second was flaxen haired with the lighter, hazel eyes of her father, and a skin that flushed pink in the fresh northern winds.
Six months after that, however, Annie was a widow.
‘She’d poisoned him,’ they said. ‘Aye, and no doubt worth more dead than alive with his life insurance.’ Whispers and rumours were exchanged swiftly over walls and washing lines, from back doors to kitchens, and from pew to pew on Sundays. Jed Bailey had been a big man – physically robust – yet look how grey and gaunt he’d become of late? How hollow-eyed. Oh, those eyes were haunted such as they’d never seen…And how his clothes hung from his flesh and the skin sagged from his bones… like a scarecrow he was, and all since he’d wedded that witch. Because a witch is what she was and no mistake. Jed never used to miss a Sunday in church yet ever since she showed up he’d not once crossed the threshold, even to baptise his girls. ‘Oh, and hadn’t she got it all sewn up nicely? Jed’s crippled son, Bill, did all the hard work – living up on the moors in that shepherd’s hut just a child himself
– while she kept the tithed cottage on Wish Lane, taking in sewing and reading palms. Not that they personally had their palms read. No, but they’d heard she made poultices and some silly girls went to her for love potions. ‘Oh no, really?’ ‘Oh, yes…apparently…’
Annie had not remarried, but quietly remained in the cottage bringing up her daughters; keeping a low profile and avoiding further speculation, notably about the rights to the farm cottage. There were ways, of course, of giving folk precisely what they wanted; and ways of reflecting straight back any spite sent her way. Eventually the people came to know that, to understand. Given time.
Twenty-three years it had been thus, but now change was coming… and coming far more quickly than expected.
With her head down against the sharp, spring breeze Annie hurried down Gallows Hill towards the Church of England on the east side of Ludsmoor. There would have been very few in the congregation today and those who had been present would have long since gone home. With luck she would have it to herself.
Ludsmoor Church had stood on the corner where Gallows Hill met Hilltop Road for as long as anyone could remember. Originally a Saxon construction of stone and mud, one wall of herringbone masonry had been preserved down the ages, along with two triangular headed windows and a tower topped with a simple bell-cote. This was all that remained of its medieval origins however, with various improvements added piecemeal over the years and the walls now made of sturdy stone and mortar. Typically gothic additions were the ornate spire adorned with gargoyles at the four corners of the tower; an arched doorway – again with gargoyles either side – and stained glass windows. It was said that during the Civil War, Cromwell’s men had blasted much of the church away including the stained glass, the fragments of which had been preserved by the local vicar and later painstakingly replaced in its original form.
The grey stone walls were now smoothly polished from years of being pelted with wind and rain, and the hall attached to the side seemed disproportionately large for the few who still attended. Now it rattled with emptiness – every cough or wrong note echoing self-consciously. It seemed to many that the church was something of a tomb for the Danby family – a relic from days gone by. In a recess at the back lay a large sarcophagus, built for one of the Crusading knights in the eleventh century. Above it, his crest, gauntlet and spurs were still on display along with a brass plaque to commemorate his bravery. The Danby Coat of Arms and tablets dedicated to various family members adorned the church at every turn. Even the eleventh century coffin lids, now a row of six stone benches outside, bore the distinctive deer figures carved along the sides - a feature predominant on their Coat of Arms.
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