Static had crackled in her ear and after a while the only sound was that of the rafters creaking and snow flying against the windows. It must have been shortly after that she’d begun the night’s vigil of walking around the house not knowing quite what to do. Iciness shivered into her skin, permeating her bones to the marrow but she found she could not rest. An ethereal whiteness from outside shone through the windows, somehow managing to make the interior seem darker; her footsteps echoing starkly as methodically, room by room, she wandered in and wandered out again.
At midnight the grandfather clock in the hall chimed twelve and abruptly she stopped pacing. Wasn’t there something she was supposed to do?
Oh God, Snow…
Climbing the stairs again, her knees almost too rigid to bend, she was half in mind to go straight to her bed, so weighed down with fatigue she could have slept where she fell. But Snow’s incessant humming, once she became aware of it above the noise of the storm, drew her on, further down the corridor and back to Marion’s room where she had left her earlier.
As soon as she pushed open the door it was clear the girl’s state of mind had worsened. So much so that Ellen stood in the doorway wide-eyed with her heart skittering in her chest. If only Marion was here. Where was Marion? Where was Rosa? Where did they keep her pills? Could she get her to take them?
She bit her lip and clung to the door handle.
Snow was rocking to and fro but so violently the chair seemed likely to tip over. Saliva drooled from the corner of her mouth and her eyes had rolled back in her head so far that only the whites were showing. There was a pool of urine on the floor as she ranted and raged in an unfathomable tongue; and with every swing of the chair her head snapped from side to side like that of a plastic doll.
Paralysed with terror, Ellen’s throat moved but the words lodged and stuck fast. Even if she could find Snow’s pills she wouldn’t be able to get her to take them when she was like this. If only Marion and Rosa would come home. What was she to do? What did her daughters do with the girl when she got like this? Should she be restrained? And did she interrupt or just leave her to exhaust herself? It occurred to her then, how shielded she had been from the severity of Snow’s condition. The girls had protected her, even though she lived in such close proximity. Not only did Snow have a sedative at night but so did she. Ellen wrung her hands. Oh dear God, what should she do? If only they would come back…
The storm raged around the corners of the house, the metronome ticking of the clock on Marion’s mantelpiece hypnotic as she inched into the room and sat on the edge of Marion’s bed, wringing her hands and wondering what to do. How sheltered she had been all of these years - first by the nurses, then by her daughters. She set the lamp on the floor. This was a strange room; more noticeable when sitting here alone in the darkness. In the dim glow of the oil lamp it seemed as though Marion’s paintings had begun to take on altogether different meanings. The bedroom walls were covered with her artwork – landscapes mostly – of trees, flowers and ferns, graveyards and churches, skylines, lakes and moors. But all had something in common, and it was only when you noticed one that you noticed them all. When you looked closely a darkly shrouded face appeared. Surprised and somehow excited by the find, an observer would stoop to examine the painting more closely only to find the image was no longer there. Turn away, however, and back it came… sometimes more than one face… in the corner of an eye and almost as if trying to catch the viewer out. How Marion could sleep in this room with all these spooky paintings she didn’t know. It was bad enough walking past them in the hallway or down the stairs.
Quite suddenly Snow’s frenetic rocking and humming stopped dead.
Ellen gripped the quilt.
The girls’ limbs had twisted into the rigidity of a lightning-struck tree, with fingers outstretched from claw-like hands. Her head had ratcheted to one side and was now stuck at an unnatural angle, her features contorted into a gargoyle grimace. But the chanting, thank God, and the rocking, had stopped. It seemed the trance or fit was finally over. And for that she was thankful.
Unable to move the girl, who seemed to have set to stone, Ellen pulled the bedspread off the bed, draped it over her and put a pillow under her head as best she could before tip-toeing from the room. What else could she do but keep her warm until the girls came back? Marion understood these seizures of Snow’s but no one else did. Even Dr Fergusson, the old family doctor with his little black bag, would shake his head and advise that after a tot of brandy and some hot broth, she’d be right as rain.
There was a hiatus in memory after leaving Snow. What had she done next? She had left the room…but what then? She shook her head. No, there was nothing but a dense fog with no recollection at all of how she came to be in the kitchen slumped at the table.
At some time during the night, the storm must have abated because now there was only the soft hush of new snow. And for a while Ellen sat in silence as she tried to piece together events from the night before. In the hallway seconds ticked solidly into minutes on the grandfather clock, and it was around then that she started to notice a new sound. Something… a wailing… like a fox?
She tilted her head to one side. No, it couldn’t be… Straining her ears into the stillness she tried to make sense of it. That wasn’t a fox but quite definitely a baby crying. Well, how very odd. Perhaps she’d drifted into dreams again? Had she drifted off? It really must have been a dream because… no, wait… there it was again… And her children were missing!
Now she listened intently and with purpose. In between the dock-dock….dock-dock…of the brass pendulum in the hall… there it was again and quite definitely… a baby. The wailing child seemed closer now too - from directly outside the window, in fact.
Dizzy with fatigue and confusion, she pulled on wellington boots with shaking fingers. The child could die out there. She fastened up the old tweed coat kept on a hook by the back door. Someone was out there with a baby. And weren’t there children she had to look for? And all this time she’d been asleep! Ellen grabbed the torch from the shelf over the sink. Children were missing. Children of her own.
With her hand on the door handle and just about to leave, something flickered on the edge of her vision – a movement – and her glance flicked to the window ledge. Legend had it that death portended when a lone raven appeared and she nodded now, at the black, ragged creature that eyed her knowingly through the glass, pecking at the frame.
Then she stepped outside.
The temperature was mortuary-cold, her footsteps a solitary line imprinted on the snow as she crossed the lawn to the little gate leading onto the lane. Every step plunged so deeply into snow that it crumpled and oozed over the top of her boots, trickling down her legs.
Forgot socks…
The orb from her torch bobbed ineffectively in the night air, picking out one or two feet in front at the most.
Forgot gloves…
“Rosa! Marion! Are you there? Is that you?” Her breath clouded in the wintry dawn, her voice feeble, a wobbling old lady’s voice. Yet still the baby’s crying grew louder. And she stumbled on. “I’m coming. You wait there, d’ you hear? I’m coming…”
***
He is so close…the dewy musk of his skin in the swallow of his throat, the gentle warmth of his hands caressing her back. He is dotting her all over with kisses – shoulders, arms, breasts – ever more urgent… opening her blouse, tugging at the cloth, popping the buttons, sinking his head. He cannot stop, he cannot speak. She is gazing up at him from the dappled grass into the blue-grey of his eyes, and her arms reach out, pulling him down… And they roll over and over, lost and half mad until the birdsong fades and the breeze stills.
“Mum? Mother?”
He is real; far more real to her than the tea being placed into her trembling hands and the dry slippers pushed onto her feet. In the harsh light of daybreak, her mouth quivers and a steady stream of tears tumble down her crumpled-tissue cheeks.
T
he pain was still as desperate and raw now as it had ever been – the love every bit as inflamed and insecure as the very first day, and it had stayed that way for nigh on forty-three years. He’d fallen in love with her right there and then, the morning the foundation stones had been laid for the new chapel – on a fresh March day shivering with clumps of bright daffodils. Everyone in the village had been there when the largest stone etched with the words, ‘Hitherto Hath the Lord Helped us Build This Chapel, 1908’ was lifted into place. He’d stood in his white shirt sleeves for the camera, the proud smile faltering only when his gaze levelled with her own – all at once crumpling and helpless. She actually saw him fall, as if he had lost his very soul and she had caught it. And it seemed to them both that the rain clouds drew back from the sun for that one inexplicable moment, and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.
From the corner of her eye, on the very edge of her vision, a part of her saw the sourness of expression on her mother’s face and the dark glower on her sister’s; but she had paid no heed, returning his smile without hesitation. And two months later they were married in the very same chapel.
And yes, she’d known there would be a curse. Her mother was always mixing hexes and Agnes helped her. But why it should have angered her mother and sister that she had married so well was beyond her. Perhaps it was because Agnes, as the older sister, should have been first? Or was it jealousy? She’d tried, really tried, to make them both a part of her good fortune but it only seemed to incite further fury, the hatred growing stronger every day. How had it got so bad, though; so evil, prolonged and relentless? And surely her belief in God should have offered protection from such malice? A curse would work if you let it, she knew that much. If it quite literally worried you sick you gave your enemies the power to reduce you, but not if you were resolute and prayed daily for His protection? Surely?
Although she possessed strong intuition and a gift for clairvoyance, however, she did not and would not dabble with magic. Not even counter-magic. Sorely tempted to use it she refrained and chose instead to attend Chapel regularly and pray in earnest. Alas, it became clear very quickly that those who had stooped the lowest had won.
It took them three years. After which there was nothing left.
“Mother?”
Dazed, she looked around at a large, gloomy kitchen as if from the end of a very long tunnel – at flames flickering in the grate, at the honey-glow of an oil lamp on the table, and at a woman’s face she felt she should know, peering into her own.
How had she got here?
“Mother, we’re home and we’re both safe. You’d fallen down outside. Can you feel your legs? We found you on the road—” The voice seemed to come from a long way off, trailing away; then suddenly amplifying again as if she had surfaced from the bottom of a well – everything too loud, too bright…
“Hurry up with the brandy, Marion. It’s on the top shelf behind the flour.”
***
Chapter Seventeen
1908
Annie Bailey
Their haste was downright indecent.
Annie stood with her arms folded and her face set to granite, watching Aaron Danby’s men hack down Old Man Odin. With ladders and ropes they scaled the ancient oak as nimbly as monkeys, and proceeded in a frenzy of glinting axes to slash, saw and splinter it apart with great, savage cracks that severed the tree limb from limb. It seemed to Annie that a murderous gleam burned in each man’s eye, a fever of determination and self-righteousness as they worked hour upon hour, until at last the job was done and all that remained was a stump.
They stood back admiring their work, panting and sweating, abruptly released and staggering with near delirium. It had taken the best part of a day and now all around them, everywhere they looked, were stacks of logs and chunks of timber, piles of branches still budding with leaves, and bundles of twigs strewn on a carpet of sawdust. There seemed enough, they said, to build not one but two or even three new houses – look how much fresh wood they had from just one tree! The gang of red-faced men flopped to the ground dabbing at foreheads and necks with handkerchiefs, swigging from hip flasks. By God, it had taken some felling, had that!
Annie waited a while, wondering if they would attempt to pull up the stump itself or if the roots would be left in place. The men were cooling off in the breeze, discussing the matter, while wives arrived with bread and cheese and a few children began to play fight with sticks. Those roots, all agreed, had snaked under the ground for centuries, hooking round boulders and anchoring into the earth. They wouldn’t come out easily. They’d need a couple of carthorses. It’d be another day, maybe more…
As the sun dipped behind the clouds and muscle fatigue set in, they started to collect together their tools. A local farmer had arrived with a horse and cart and the timber had to be loaded on before nightfall. It would take many loads but then they were done, and whatever was left would serve as firewood for the locals – many of whom had already turned out to scavenge.
Annie held her breath. It looked as though the roots would be left intact after all, which at least was something. But just as she made to turn away, Aaron and his father, Edward Danby, clattered down the lane on horseback.
She recoiled into the shadows as the horses cantered over the common and the two men quickly dismounted. Wearing the long, leather boots and riding habits characteristic of the well-to-do, their presence immediately commanded authority, dissipating scavengers and playful children in one swoop. And it soon became apparent that the Danbys weren’t happy. Voices were raised as dusk fell, carts were loaded and bonfires crackled. Annie strained to hear. The Danbys wanted the lot ripping out even if the men had to work all night: the building of the chapel must start tomorrow. In fact they were surprised, nay horrified, that the roots were still there ‘infesting’ the earth. Working speedily to clear the area, the men were telling them it would take longer, and even then the roots were so deeply embedded they could never truly be removed. Not in entirety. The horses could pull out the main stump and they’d hack at the rest the best they could, but not the roots and even then, it would take another day, maybe two. The chapel could still be built, but if they wanted it done quickly…
They did.
Then the roots would have to stay.
A few harsh words later the matter was finally decided and hands were shaken. Tomorrow morning a supply of stones and equipment would arrive along with a dozen men from the quarry. They would be well paid but after a good night’s sleep work must recommence at dawn. The Danbys then called for their horses, and in sombre mood the men finished loading up the last of the timber by lamplight.
When the sound of thudding hooves had died away and all that remained was the spit and crack of twigs on the bonfire, Annie crept from her hiding place unseen. So then, they meant to do it! Overhead, the March clouds sweeping across the new moon were brooding with rain and in an agitated state she began to hurry across the common towards Grytton.
The forest, when it came into view, wore the tail end of winter like a rag in the wind, its ancient sentinels skeletal against a bruised night sky. She did not need to think about which path to take – her feet seemed to lift and guide her with a rhythmic pull along a trail older than time. A light breeze stirred the leaves in her wake, and soon the air turned sweet with damp earth and pungent verdure, the track beginning to taper. There was a feeling of spiralling inwards towards the centre of a labyrinth, and her body grew weightless, her senses exalted. The veil between this world and the next was gossamer fine.
They were letting her in…
Her heart began to flutter like that of a dying bird. Her steps quickened. Her breath came dizzily. Almost here… to the druids’ tree grove… to where the power would flow. Tonight magic would be made and The Four were waiting as she knew they would be. The door was open and her feet flew; and then finally it was there before her and she stood dazed, out of breath, and entranced. Was the dark side not a wonderful thing? There w
hen no one else was - to give you everything you desired. All you had to do was invite it in.
The small clearing buzzed with static, and everything she touched, including her own dress, sparked with electricity. A light mist hovered over a pool of still water, brushed at the edges with the fronds of a weeping willow; and the burial stones, which she had only had the privilege to see once before, radiated fluorescent light. One…two…three…four… Meg, Agnus, Lizzie and Anne.
Annie fell to her knees, brushing away fallen twigs and leaves from one of the graves, in order to recite words of thanks and pay homage to the wise old women who had been persecuted by churchmen centuries before. Hanged then burned at the stake, each woman was then buried face down in the woods with pitchforks through their backs and boulders rolled over them lest they ever dare to walk the earth again. Such was the fear. Such was the cruelty and the ignorance. And so it was again.
A few large drops of rain spattered onto the rocks, big flat splats, and the air stilled. No birds sang and no sounds came from the forest as Annie took from her pocket the small effigy she had made of Aaron Danby and placed it on the ground by the base of the weeping willow, making sure to thank the spirits that dwelled within the tree, for their help. Fashioned from a mixture of wax and clay before being melted into a grotesque mask, the poppet was further enhanced by several strands of hair taken from the coat he’d hung in the church porch, and bound with one of his handkerchiefs spotted with blood. What a happy find that was. Had he suffered a nose bleed or grazed a finger? A lucky addition indeed.
The Soprano Page 12