by Mary Stewart
‘Don’t bother to answer,’ I told him. ‘It was a silly question anyway. If you had, you’d have eaten it. But you wouldn’t, would you? Because of course you’re Hodge?’
A movement of the head, a glint of those magnificent eyes, confirmed it.
I poured myself another cup of coffee, sat down in the rocker opposite him, and considered.
Hodge. Cousin Geillis’s cat. Who had disappeared when she left Thornyhold. Who had come back the moment I was here, with the house to myself. Who, incidentally, must have made the sound that had disturbed me as I came down from the bath.
I was very glad to see him. Now that he was here, and safe, I realised how much I had been worrying over his disappearance and possible death. Look after Hodge. He will miss me. The only specific request Cousin Geillis had made, and I had not been able to carry it out. Moreover, though I had thought myself beyond wanting company I was glad of this, the ideal companion. Hodge, the cat of the house.
The witch’s cat.
That was what William had said, wasn’t it? The witch’s cat. And he had vanished, to starve or worse, when she had gone. And now that I was here, he had come back.
‘Are you a witch, too?’ William had asked.
I laughed, and set down my empty cup. ‘Am I?’ I asked Hodge. ‘Well, I dare say we’ll find out somehow, soon enough. I’m going to bed. Where do you sleep? Oh, I see. I might have known.’
As I rose, the cat jumped down from his chair to lead the way, tail high, for the stairs. By the time I was ready to get into bed he was there before me, curled by the pillow, purring.
He must have been tired as well as hungry. Before I slept myself the purring had stopped, abruptly, and the witch’s cat was silently, profoundly, asleep.
I awoke, it seemed immediately. It was still quite dark, but I knew that I must have slept already, soundly, for I felt wide awake, and refreshed. More, eager to be out of bed. A feeling of breathlessness made me long for the air.
Trying not to disturb the cat, I slid out of bed and padded to the window.
Behind the upper branches a few stars pulsed, and a cloud-held moon. Their pale light served only to show the black tracery of the boughs. But my own night-sight seemed strangely accurate: I could have sworn that I could see, quite clearly, a pair of owls sitting high in a beech beyond the toolshed. They sat huddled near the trunk of the tree, and as I watched, one of them elongated itself till it was tall and stiff as a billet of wood, its head swivelled round in the extraordinary way of its kind. It was watching something beyond, behind the trees.
A light. Low down and dancing, a yellow light. And with it, though from much further away, a sound. Incredibly, people were singing. It was no song that I had ever heard, a low, almost dirge-like chant, with little tune to it, but with a strong and steady rhythm which coincided with, or gradually overtook, the heartbeat that I could, now, strongly feel as I leaned out over the windowsill.
It was like looking down from a height into a swirling sea; the rhythmic beat, the little whirls of wind in the branches, the shifting and beckoning light; all conspiring to draw the dreamer out towards the dark, into the night.
But I was not dreaming. I was not asleep. The room, the garden, all was familiar, and from somewhere, as if in reply to the music, a dog began to bark, distressfully. The same dog, I was sure, that I had heard last night. And now, beside me on the windowsill, was Hodge, wild-furred and wide-eyed, teeth and tongue showing as he spat and hissed at the darkness.
The witch’s cat. And what I could hear, what the light betrayed, beckoning into the deep wood, was a meeting of witches. The sabbath of the local coven. I knew it, as if the knowledge had come in one of those edged flashes of illumination, certainty held in spell-light. So it was true that there were witches still. And true, perhaps, that Cousin Geillis had been one of them? And was this proof that I, the second Geillis of Thornyhold, was one of the elect? The thought was heady, a flow of power going through body and brain, strong and cool and sweet.
Here Hodge, the cat, leaped out from the windowsill into the darkness. And I, reaching to catch him, for the leap was too high even for a cat, overbalanced and fell.
I never reached the ground. Nor was it truly a fall. The wind, the sweep of the night air, sucked me out of the window and carried me up, up above the trees, as easily as if I had been a bird or a dead leaf. Round me the air felt as buoyant and resistant as water. I could control my passage, almost as if swimming. I shook my head and my hair flew out in the race of air. I opened my lips and drank the flood of my own passing. Ecstasy was in every pore, every hair. This was power and glory. Whatever was required, it was worth it for this.
Below me, as motionless as if there were no wind at all, the forest stretched black and still. The airstream that carried me flowed high between the black boughs and the stars. It flowed between the very stars, above the moon. The moon had sunk low, and presently the trees were gone, and in front of me a hill rose from the darkness, lifting a black curve to cut across the moon’s face. There were stones on the hill, massive menhirs, some fallen, some upright, set apparently at random in the turf. The light that had drawn me out through the window was circling among them, and presently it alighted.
I sank down towards it, landing effortlessly, as lightly as a gull on water, and there, a few yards away, was the fallen shape of a vast stone, and on it a bowl where the yellow flame floated in a pool of sweet-smelling oil. Beside the bowl a heap of something; feathers? a trailing wing? A black pigeon with its neck wrung.
Shadows were moving round among the stones. People. They were barely visible, but from all around came that same rhythmic, meaningless chant that the wind had brought to me at Thornyhold.
Hesitantly, not afraid, but full of awe and a strong, tingling excitement, I approached the lighted stone. The grass beneath my bare feet felt ice-cold. I welcomed it. My body burned still, as if it had been drenched with very hot water. The dizzy euphoria of the flight was fading. My eyes ached. The light, gentle though it was, hurt them; there was grit inside the lids. I stretched a hand towards the fallen stone. I was conscious of the shadow-people crowding nearer, of the chant growing and swelling among the standing stones. The moon had almost gone. She filled only a copper rim, and a cloud scarred her face.
Someone stood between me and the stone, a woman, tall, dressed in a long cloak that blew about her. She looked familiar, like a memory from the pond in the meadow when I was six years old.
‘Cousin Geillis?’ I shouted it, but made no sound. The woman never moved, but there was a rustle at my feet, and I paused and looked down. A hedgehog, whining and snuffling, nudged about amongst the grass. A bird flew across at waist height, a flash of deep kingfisher blue even in the dead light of the moon. And after it leaped Hodge the cat, a small shadow among the other shadows. He shot hissing between my feet, tripping me. I fell on my face. The turf was surprisingly soft, and not cold any more.
Hands took me, gently, and turned me over on my back. In the yellow light, swimming against the blackness, I saw faces. Most were strange, misty and changing as I looked, like faces in a dream. But foremost and unchanging, were two that I knew.
‘Be she all right?’ asked Jessamy Trapp. His voice was anxious.
‘Oh, yes, she’s all right.’ Agnes smiled down at me, triumphant, smug. ‘I knew it all along, didn’t I? You’re fine, my lady … and next time it’ll be better still. Now shut your eyes again, and we’ll see you back where you belong.’
Before she had finished speaking, my eyes had shut fast, like the eyes of a doll that has no will of its own. There was the faintest sensation of floating once again, or being lifted, then nothing. As if Agnes’s order had blacked out my conscious brain, I either fainted, or fell into another deep sleep, for when I opened my eyes again I was in bed at Thornyhold, and the window was shut, and Hodge the cat was asleep at my feet, and it was morning.
And I awoke, and behold it was a dream.
It took me a long time,
through clinging mists of that deep sleep, to shake off the effects of the dream. For dream it had to be. Now in the sweet daylight the beckonings of witchcraft were impossible and wrong.
It had to be. I drew myself up against the pillows and thought about it. I felt, it was true, much more as if I had spent the night flying to meet a coven than resting, even dreaming violently, in my own bed. My head ached; the gritty sensation behind the eyelids was still there; the faintest residue of heat remained in my skin. The bedclothes smelled of sweat, and though I knew that one sweated with a vivid nightmare, this smelled somehow different.
But did this mean that, my God, I had been flying – flying – over the forest tops, had been watching a coven dancing among Druid stones, and had tried to reach what was probably their altar light? An altar where Jessamy and Agnes Trapp moved among the crowd, where a tall shadow like my dead Cousin Geillis was standing, and where the corpse of the dead pigeon from the Thornyhold attic had been brought as an offering?
All the indications, I told myself, were that I had had a bad nightmare. The dream was made up of the elements of yesterday, and of the further past – the hedgehog, the kingfisher, Cousin Geillis herself. And supposing, impossibly, that it had been true, how had the Trapps brought me home? How had they got in? Both doors downstairs were locked and bolted. And now, in this morning daylight, with a wren singing in the bushes outside, I refused to believe that they had flown with me through the bedroom window. And shut and latched it, I supposed, by magic, after they had flown out?
Here Hodge the cat opened his eyes, put out a paw, and stretched.
‘Were you out flying last night?’ I asked him.
And got no answer, or only a negative one. The cat had certainly moved during the night, for where he had gone to sleep curled close against me, he was lying now near the foot of the bed, on top of the dressing-gown I had left there.
Which proved nothing. But common sense (so easy to assume in daylight) insisted that Hodge had merely been part of a nightmare which had been brought on, probably, by the stuffiness of the room. Since I had forgotten to open the window—
I had not forgotten to open the window. I had done it, as I now clearly remembered, just before I got into bed; and now it was shut.
I sat there staring at the shut window, while common sense fought a losing battle with imagination. Perhaps, I told myself, the aged sash-cords had given way, and the heavy window had fallen shut of its own accord (without waking me?), and in the warmth of the room I had slept too deeply, and had had a bad dream. A dream vivid enough to tire me, and to leave a hangover. But I was awake now, and it was a brilliant day, a normal day, and Hodge was home, and there was work to do. Work, the answer to every kind of nightmare. And to begin with, I would clean this room myself, and change the bedding all over again.
I threw back the bedclothes, swung my feet over the side of the bed, and reached for the dressing-gown.
‘Come on,’ I said to Hodge. ‘You’ll have to—’
I stopped short. The cat had moved when I did, and now jumped to the floor, yawning and stretching. Where he had been lying, on the folds of my dressing-gown, was a wisp of dry grass, pressed flat by his sleeping weight. And halfway between the bed and the window, yellow against the green of the carpet, lay a dead leaf.
There is a passage somewhere in Coleridge’s writings which, once read, had stayed in my memory. I could not then have quoted it accurately, but the gist of it, as I sat there on the edge of the bed, with one arm arrested as I reached for the dressing-gown, came flooding to drown the weak struggles of common sense. If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found the flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye, and what then?
What then, indeed?
No answer there, either, for a woman who had passed through some shadowy annexe to the Other-world, and found dead plants for proof when she awoke …
From overhead came a patter, a scratching and the scrabble of claws. Hodge looked up sharply, yellow eyes narrow and concentrated.
‘I forgot to take water up,’ I said aloud, and had to clear my throat to say it. Then I grabbed the dressing-gown, banished Coleridge back to his opium-clouds, and went to have a bath.
By the time I had bathed and dressed the dream had receded, as dreams do, and the ideas it had engendered had faded even further. Before I made my breakfast I let Hodge out of the back door (still locked fast) and then filled the enamel jug with water and carried it up to the attic.
I opened the door gently, and went in. There were two pigeons in the attic. One, my friend of yesterday, was pecking round on the floor, but on a windowsill, regarding me with an eye the colour of a Mexican opal, was a new one, a blue-grey pigeon, with white barred wings. It made a soft sound in its throat, shifting from foot to foot as if nervous. I scattered a handful of grain, and bent to fill the trough with water. The blue-grey pigeon flew straight down and stooped to drink.
Then I saw the ring on its leg.
Gently, carefully, I took hold of the bird. It made no attempt to escape. I managed to detach the tiny ring. Then I put the bird down again, and let it feed.
Over by the window, I unfolded the flimsy paper. There was a message printed very small, in capitals.
WELCOME MY DEAR FROM YOUR COUSIN GEILLIS.
13
When I left for Arnside soon after lunch, I took care to lock both doors.
Arnside was a pleasant, small market town, with a few good shops, a cobbled market place, and a church rather too big for its present needs. The choice of shops was not great, and I soon made my selection and registered for groceries and meat, did what shopping I could, then visited the bank and made myself known to the manager, a pleasant man, Thorpe by name, who spoke warmly of my Cousin Geillis, and expressed himself very willing to help me in whatever way he could. I handed over the letters from Martin and Martin, signed papers opening my new bank account, and was shown a very cheering balance. On my asking Mr Thorpe’s advice about installing a telephone, he made the call for me there and then. It was still not easy, he told me, to get a new line put in, but as Thornyhold was so isolated he thought he could press my case, and the telephone would surely be installed before winter came. And yes, he said, he knew Hannaker’s Garage at St Thorn, and when I did see my way clear to buying a car, I would be in safe hands there.
Finally, on my mentioning Mrs Trapp, he put a call through for me to Martin and Martin and then left his office while I took it. What I heard from them did something to set my mind at rest; they had certainly informed Mrs Trapp of Miss Ramsey’s impending arrival some time in September, and, Miss Saxon having employed her from time to time, Mrs Trapp had her own key, or rather, knew where one was kept. By the same token, the solicitors had judged her to be the best person to get the house ready for me. They did hope that all was well? I was quite satisfied with the way I had found things? I assured them that I was, thanked them, thanked Mr Thorpe, and then, on the strength of that bank balance, went into the ironmonger’s next door and managed to buy, with a feeling of quite absurd pleasure, the first gift for my new home, a pair of tea-towels and three yellow dusters.
Then I set off for home. After only a mile or so on the main highway, my way branched off into empty country roads, which curled along in the shade of deep banks clad with ivy and crowned with trees. Here and there along the roadside were quarries, long disused, where road metal had been dug. They were filled now with thickets of sloe and bramble, and I could see the sunlight glinting on fruit reddening to ripeness. I remembered the empty jars in the toolshed, ready for the bramble jelly I intended to make …
Of such small things is happiness made. I pedalled home to the sound of tins clinking in the basket, and presently turned in through the drive gates towards Thornyhold.
As I passed the lodge I saw Agnes, out in the tiny yard at the side, pegging out some towels and a couple of checked shirts which must belon
g to Jessamy.
She hung the peg bag on the line and waved, taking a step towards me. I stopped, and she approached, smiling.
‘You been to town?’
‘Yes. I enjoyed it, too. It’s a lovely ride, isn’t it? It’s years since I’ve been on a bike, but it’s true that you don’t forget how! By the time I got to the end of the drive I felt fine, and there was very little traffic on the main road.’
‘It can be bad market days, when the farmers go in. Nice town, though, isn’t it?’
‘Very. I didn’t really explore, because I wanted to get back, but there seemed to be lots to see. The church looks lovely, almost a cathedral. Is the music good?’
‘Music?’ She looked blank. ‘I don’t know much about music. Never been in there, anyway. You a churchgoer, then?’
I laughed. ‘Brought up to be as regular as clockwork.’
A quick look. ‘More than your aunty was.’
‘Not my aunt, my cousin. You don’t surprise me. I seem to remember that she wasn’t exactly a believer.’
‘Hm.’ A nod, as if I had confirmed something. Then another speculative look at me. ‘Is everything all right at the house? You look as if you haven’t slept. Was them birds in the roof disturbing you? Jessamy told me about that pigeon. All sorts used to go in there after the food. Dirty things. Vermin, I call them, but fond of them all, she was, for all she was such a real lady. Kept you awake, did they?’
‘No. Actually, there was only one, and I didn’t hear it at all.’
‘You should ha’ let Jessamy bring it away with the dead one. Then keep that window shut.’