All was quiet. The shoppers had long dispersed and the back streets were empty. Shivering, Scarlet quickened her steps. Here in the dark unlit alleys that led towards the old railway station and the derelict house, there was a sense of danger. The house, though, where Scarlet had found shelter on many a cold night, was not too far. Scarlet was heartened by the thought. Drawing her tattered tweed coat more securely about her thin figure, she pressed on. In a moment the house was in sight: a severe Victorian monstrosity, it stood close to the railway lines, surrounded by debris and with its many small windows shattered. Yet it was sturdy, and the roof remained intact. Many a homeless soul had found refuge within its walls.
Carefully wending her way through the broken glass and brickbats that littered the ground floor, Scarlet found her way into a corner of what might once have been the parlour. Here she made herself comfortable, and settled down to sleep, her coat pulled over her bent knees, and her belongings wedged against the wall for a pillow. The silence was eerie, broken only by the occasion echo of engines being shunted along the nearby railway line. The tiredness weighed heavily. She drifted in and out of sleep. The walls seemed to close in on her. The house was another, from the shadows that were her past. The room was a prison and she was captured there, a child, small and afraid. ‘No, Daddy… don’t leave me here!’ Her voice startled the still air, frightening her. Suddenly she was sitting bolt upright, cold, trembling, with the beads of sweat clammy on her skin; she was intensely aware of her isolation, her vulnerability.
For a long, desperately uncomfortable moment, Scarlet made no move. She dared not. All of her instincts told her there was someone else here, in this room. Skulking in the dark. Watching her. Her flesh tingled. She kept every muscle still, and listened. Nothing stirred. Only her fearful imagination. Relieved, she leaned back against the wall, wincing as the sharp, jagged protrusions dug into the arc of her shoulders. Fatigued, she closed her eyes, letting the weariness wash over her in dizzy waves. Sleep eluded her. Through the gap where the window had been, Scarlet could see the moon, wintery and cold to the eye; it stared back at her like a pale, dead face. Her mother’s face! ‘Hannah.’ The name was uttered like the cry of a child. Gripped by a terrible sadness, Scarlet bowed her head. The tears coursed down her face, warm and comforting. ‘Hannah… Mammy.’ She whispered the words over and over and was strangely relieved. Moved by a deep inexplicable compulsion, she began feverishly delving into the suitcase; she had a great need to feel the jewels between her fingers. They comforted her. As did the memory of the name Shelagh.
In the light of the moon, the gems lay in her hands like grey matter. The longer she gazed on them, the sharper became the image in Scarlet’s mind; of someone else, bent over the trinkets, caressing them. The image shifted. Smooth, dark hair. Piercing grey eyes! Terror flooded her heart. IT WAS HIM! The maggot at the core of her existence. Her heart folded into itself, as the image became real. Warm and close. She opened her mouth to scream and, suddenly, he was on her! Tearing at her, ripping the gems from her hand. Fingers thrust into her coat, seeking the warmth of her breasts, the foul, rancid mouth covering hers. She pushed and fought, fists flailing. Her assailant was too strong, too determined. Her hand felt the sharp angled shape of a brickbat. Instinctively, she clutched it into her groping fingers. But then, just as quickly, it was wrenched from her. Then a voice, whispering, laughing, a voice she knew. The woman’s voice!
‘Always knew you were a beauty underneath them rags. It’s a pity you don’t like ol’ Meg… you an’ me, we could a’ been good pals… real good pals!’ Again the lewd laughter, quickly subsiding when there came the sound of footsteps picking their way through the debris. The last thing Scarlet saw before the brickbat thudded into her temple, was the vagrant’s face, leering, taunting, superimposed by his face. The penetrating grey eyes mocked her, even through her dying senses.
The layers of fog began to peel away. Like the spasmodic burst of candlelight in the instant before the flame splutters and dies, the images flickered clear and sharp in her mind. Deep-rooted terror pressed her down. One after the other, the faces sought her out. Hannah, Cassie. Just as she had imagined. But they were disembodied. Without substance. The pain was unendurable. Her father. Silas, SILAS! HER FATHER! A white, blood-spattered shroud; and the kneeling figure. Cloaked and hooded. STEEPED IN DEATH. MURDER. Who? WHO? The horror filled her soul, growing until there was no place for it to go but outwards. Like a tidal wave the awful scream burst from her. ‘NO! NO!’ Her hands flew to her temples. Hot, sticky blood. Staining her fingers. Crimson splashes on a white background. Mutilated! Spiralling through the maelstrom in her mind came a friendly face with round brown eyes. ‘Shelagh!’ The name left Scarlet’s lips as a cry for help.
‘Ssh, child. Put your arm round my neck.’ Scarlet felt herself being tenderly lifted. Soft, comforting hands tended her wound and the face that bent over her was kind, concerned. The vision was an angel, all in white, soft, flowing. Smudged with blood. ‘Can you stand, my dear?… lean on me.’ The voice gentled into Scarlet’s mind. Dazed, trusting, she pushed herself up. Crumbling legs folded beneath her. ‘Alright, don’t worry… I’ll get help.’ The words echoed down a long black tunnel. The room was spinning. In the shifting grey sky, the moon remained passive, its yellow luminance casting a weird glow on Scarlet’s pallid face. Unseeing, she slithered into a cradle of darkness.
Outside, the nuns dispensed mugs of hot broth to the waiting vagrants. The sight of Sister Ellen rushing from the derelict house, her long white habit sullied and a look of alarm on her face, did not disturb them. Someone was hurt. Dying, maybe.
But then, there were worse things than death!
17
‘Where d’you reckon she is… after all this time?’ John Blackwood threw the remainder of his sandwich to the birds, his blue eyes fixed in a thoughtful gaze, as he asked his wife, ‘What’s become of her, d’you think?’ He slurped the remaining dregs from his cup and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, ‘You’d a’ thought Scarlet might a’ kept in touch with Shelagh, at least. They were friends when all’s said and done.’
‘Humph!’ Ada Blackwood snorted and shifted beside him. ‘Dunno about “friends”.’ She stretched her neck to see what her son was doing. Satisfied that he was busily mending his fishing line, she returned her attention to her husband. ‘If you ask me, I’d say they were more “strange bedfellows” than friends. I certainly wouldn’t want them for friends. Neither of ’em!… and that’s a fact.’
‘That don’t surprise me at all, Ada Blackwood!’ John laughed. ‘You’re one o’ them rare women who prefers her own company. You never did like Scarlet anyway… not when she were a little girl, an’ not in all the years since.’
‘I don’t deny it.’ She half-turned her head, quietly regarding him and thinking, sadly, how the passage of time was beginning to show: in the hair that was streaked with grey, in the growing stoop of his shoulders and the lines that lately were etched deeper into his lean face. The mirror showed her the same truths. But life was good. They had a fine young son, tall and strong, not far off his sixteenth birthday. But already a man in the making.
‘I allus thought you were harsh in your judgement of Scarlet. Life was harsh on her… giving her up to a man like Vincent Pengally.’ He laughed, a tight cruel sound, ‘They say the devil looks after his own. Well!… it seems he’s looking after that one alright!’ He raised his condemning eyes to Greystone House. ‘Almost eight years since that wicked man drove his own daughter away. They reckoned ’e were on his deathbed then.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘The bugger still ain’t dead, is he?’
‘He might as well be… from what you tell me,’ remarked Ada, her gaze also drawn to the upper window of that darkened room where she knew Vincent Pengally to be wasting away. ‘Although, I do believe you could be too harsh on Pengally.’ She gave a small chuckle. But then it died on her lips when she saw the seriousness of her husband’s face.
‘I ain�
��t being “too harsh”, Ada,’ he murmured, ‘an’ I’ll tell you some’at else… you’ll not get me setting foot in that house again. Not as long as I live! I couldn’t rightly refuse my help when Shelagh found him collapsed outside the bedroom… she would never a’ got him back in bed on her own, that’s for sure.’ He shivered. ‘But, oh, I’m telling you, gall… if I ever saw the living dead… it were on that day, in the form o’ Vincent Pengally!’
‘Illness is never a pretty sight.’
‘I know that. But it weren’t just the “illness” I saw in his face. There were some’at else… a worse disease. Ugly and terrible, like a mad hunger.’ He would have said ‘it were eating away his very soul’. But he had said enough. Talking of Vincent Pengally was repugnant to him. It brought back the effigy to his mind. Not of a man. But of a thing so awful that he had suffered many a sleepless night because of it.
‘Aye, well… he’s been ill a long time. I do marvel at the way Shelagh devotes herself to him.’ She smiled knowingly. ‘Mind you… I heard in the butcher’s shop that Vincent Pengally has changed his will in her favour.’
‘So if Scarlet was to come back, there’d be nothing to call her own, eh?’
‘Huh!… She gave up all right to anything from her father when she got herself with child… an’ her little more than a child herself!’ Her expression became one of disgust. ‘An’ to think she led us all to believe that young Garrett Summers were the father. Dear God, what terrible heartache she caused old Edward Summers. No wonder he died a broken man. That woman has a lot to answer for. I’m not surprised she daren’t show her face round these parts.’
‘Ada Blackwood, you’re a hard woman, that you are.’ His voice grew stern. ‘But I’ll not have you putting all the blame on Scarlet’s shoulders… not when you don’t know… you don’t know.’ He fell silent, his thoughts carrying him back over the years, rearing images that made him shudder: images of a boy, made to suffer the harshest brutality, and a girl whose vulnerable mind was warped by the foulest creature that God ever saw fit to put on this earth. In his mind’s eye he saw the formidable figure of a man, shadowy in the glow of candlelight, and gazing on his own child with eyes that glittered evil thoughts. If Scarlet had gone wrong along the way, then who could condemn her? Certainly not him! And not anyone who knew the truth. There were those who said that Scarlet Pengally was a monster. He did not deny that she had been the cause of some heartache. But her own pain was no doubt much greater. She was no monster. Scarlet Pengally was an innocent victim, created by another monster who was her father. She was to be pitied. Not blamed.
‘What d’you mean… “I don’t know”.’ Ada had long suspected that her husband had seen and heard things at Greystone House that he had never revealed. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ she insisted, resting the darning on her lap and looking up with quizzical eyes. ‘What’s playing on your mind?’
For a seemingly endless time he gave no answer. Instead he stared up at Greystone House, hurt by the deterioration that had taken place over the years. Twice he had offered to put the garden and smithy to rights. But Shelagh had brought back Vincent Pengally’s express instructions that ‘no stranger will set foot on Pengally land… not while I’m alive!’ On many occasions afterwards, he had appeared at the bedroom, his searching grey eyes raking over what was his. Watching. Suspicious. And always with a murderous expression on his wasting features. Only the orchards and the outer fields were kept tended. John Blackwood was grateful at least that he was allowed to carry on with the market gardening. But then, as Shelagh reminded him, ‘it’s the only income we have now.’ He recalled that there had been talk of money and Hannah’s jewellery. But he supposed it was probably gone by now, what with the smithy having been closed for so long. After all, when his own wage was paid, there was precious little left from the fruit and vegetable trade. Suddenly John felt his wife’s anxious gaze on him. ‘Sorry, love… what were you saying?’ he asked quietly.
‘By!… you’re a million miles away these days. It’s alright. I weren’t saying nothing that can’t wait.’
‘I wonder if Silas has found her. D’you think he’d let us know?’
‘He might… it depends. Mind you, it were quite a shock when he turned up on the doorstep again last summer… still searching for her. Haunted he looked. HAUNTED!’
‘Aye, that’s the right word, I’m thinking.’ He smiled, but it was a smile without mirth. ‘He’ll find her, though. Or she’ll find him.’
‘You sound very sure.’
‘Oh, I am. I’ve never been more sure of anything in me life.’
A dark silence settled between them, before Ada remarked, ‘He’s done well, though… what with owning his own smithy, and going into the buying and selling of horses.’
‘Don’t mean a thing to him, though… not without her to share it with. He told us that much. But… I would ’a guessed it anyway.’ John knew that Silas would go on searching for Scarlet. He had to.
In the instant before he followed his wife into the cottage, John’s troubled gaze was drawn once more to the upper window of Greystone House. His thoughts darkened as they dwelt on the wickedness of the man lying beyond. ‘You’re an evil man, Pengally,’ he muttered, ‘and if there’s any justice in this world… you’ll be made to suffer the same terror you caused them two innocent souls.’ For a moment his kindly eyes were stiff with hatred. Then, ashamed and shocked by the vehemence of his own feelings, he bowed his head and went inside.
In the warm sultry air John’s words lingered on. From a short distance away Trent Blackwood’s handsome green eyes were raised to the spot where his father had stood a moment earlier. He knew little of the true history surrounding Greystone House and its inhabitants. His parents were loath to satisfy his curiosity, and the village gossip was always contradictory. But he had heard things: strange, incomprehensible things, such as the unnatural relationship between father and daughter; the drowning of gentle Hannah Pengally; and the series of sinister incidents, including the wanton massacre of an entire flock of fowl. How much of it was true he did not know, for it seemed that, over the years, Greystone House and the man Pengally had become a legend where truth and imagination ran riot. Yet there was no imagining the condemning look on his father’s face just now, when he had stared up at the house. And there was no imagining the animosity of his words, ‘You’re an evil man, Pengally.’ That was all Trent had heard. It was enough to tell him what whatever had taken place over the years had touched his father deeply; too deeply for him to discuss it openly.
Ada Blackwood had also heard her husband’s words, and was made thoughtful by them. ‘You should be made to suffer,’ he had said. Unkind words from a gentle man. Yet no one could have foreseen how strangely prophetic were John’s harshly uttered words!
It was evening. The room was filled with shadows whipped alive by candlelight. There was a smell of death in the air, dallying, sempiternal. A sense of fear. Torture.
The cries were low and muted, permeating the gloom, like the tormented wail of an outcast soul. ‘You… WITCH…’ The voice was feeble, ancient, the grey eyes dulled with pain, and marbled with terror.
‘Ssh, old man. You’re not ready to die… not yet.’ Shelagh worked quickly, dabbing the treated cottonwool to the network of small deep cuts that criss-crossed the man’s torso in a weird, bloody pattern. ‘You’re a fool!’ Her small brown eyes blazed down at him. ‘I was a fool to have left the tray behind… with the knife in such easy reach. God almighty!… look at you! And the pain… the pain must be unbearable.’
‘No… NO.’ His stricken eyes were raised to hers. They grew until they were like scrubbed pebbles protruding from his gaunt face. Half-smiling, she stroked his thin grey hair and talked softly to him. When he cried out again, and shook his head slowly from side to side, she deliberately looked away, wiping his wounds with unusual tenderness and ignoring his pitiful moans until finally he was silent and still, a frame of bones against the mattress.
‘Foolish man!’ she chided. ‘I won’t let you die… you should know that.’ With painstaking deliberation, she dressed the weeping scars and drew the bedclothes over his emaciated body, her eyes hard and condemning as she stared down on his face. Reaching down to the tray beside her feet, she whispered, raising his head and putting the cup to his sagging mouth. Only when the last drop of the foul-smelling liquid was gone and the frantic spluttering had ceased, did she seem satisfied. For a long while, she continued to stare at his seemingly lifeless form, when only the laboured rhythm of his breathing disturbed the silence. Then, collecting the bowl and other paraphernalia, she went from the room, taking great care to lock the door behind her. ‘I’ll be back,’ she murmured, ‘you must have broth to keep up your strength. Later, of course, you will have to be punished.’
Part 6
1936
Journey’s End
…Long is the way
And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
18
‘Goodbye, Scarlet. May God go with you.’ Sister Ellen kissed the small wooden cross and held it out. ‘Take it, child.’ She waited until Scarlet had the cross in her grasp and was thoughtfully regarding it, before she added, ‘Remember what you have learned here. Trust in the Lord and He will guide you.’ She smiled, and her face was lit with love. ‘Keep the crucifix with you at all times. It will comfort and protect you.’
Scarlet’s exquisite dark eyes encountered the nun’s serene gaze. For a long time she gazed on that old unblemished face, her own expression betraying little of the turmoil within her. She had not yet come to believe wholly in a God who could help her. She returned the cross, saying, ‘I won’t forget your kindness. You have given me so much… yet you’ve never sought anything in return, or asked me of myself.’
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