A Hint of Witchcraft (11 page)

He smiled, regretting that she had given no other reason for the invitation. ‘Your long-suffering family can't be expected to fill the gap. But it's true: I've never known the kind of home life you have at Monk's Dene.'

‘It's the same with Lance, you know. He was very young when his mother died.'

‘Did he get over it, do you think?'

‘It must have made a difference, but Lance is such a strong person, so sure of what he wants to do. He doesn't seem to think about himself, only about what he thinks important. I suppose that's rather unusual.'

Margot reached the conclusion with surprise. She had never consciously noticed Lance, never given thought to his character, but had accepted him as a familiar feature of daily life. There was no need, no occasion to worry about him as she had so often found occasion to worry about Alex. To worry about Lance would be not only unnecessary but incongruous. A person always intent on fulfilling some purpose or other had neither time nor inclination to deviate into any kind of worrying behaviour.

Miles listened with some amusement to her inexpert analysis of Lance's character, but had she known it, the topic rather depressed him. He saw in the tawny-haired habitué of the Humbert household a being possessed of all the admirable qualities he himself lacked. Miles needed no reminder of his own deficiencies: thought of himself as indecisive, unimpressive, by nature an outsider. Even the most clearly formed of his intentions so far, to marry Margot, had as yet the luminous quality of a dream, a delight devoutly to be wished for rather than a campaign of purposeful moves towards a desired end.

His happiness was modified but he was happy still. They lingered in the porch until the sun went down, then loitered homeward in the after-glow. He reluctantly declined Margot's invitation to join the evening meal: his grandmother was still unwell and he would be wanted at home. They parted with the pang of severance, the sensation of being wrenched apart that lovers feel even though their love be undeclared, unratified by touch or kiss. In regret and rapture, Margot waited under the arch, now draped with the blue flowers of clematis, until he turned into the village street. She would remember the past hour and cherish its memory as one cherishes a gift that has outlived the giver.

But now she thought of the news she was burning to tell. She would wait until the end of the meal and while they were still at table – ‘What
do
you think?' she would say casually. ‘Miss Hepple thinks.…' Or even more nonchalantly, ‘By the way, I rather gather that Miss Hepple thinks I might go to the university.' But she knew that nonchalance was beyond her, she would blurt it out, still gasping with the amazement she had tried to conceal when Miss Hepple said, ‘Your work throughout the year has been of a consistently high standard.'

On either side of the garden path flowers were in bloom, lupins and larkspur and tiger-lilies. The perfume of orange blossom filled the air with the promise of long summer days. Had her talk with Miles roused in her a new awareness of the familiar scene? Or was she experiencing the heightened perception that warns of coming change? She saw the house as she had never seen it before. With all its windows open, curtains unruffled by any breeze, it seemed embowered in a rare stillness. It was more than an affair of brick and stone; it had garnered all the events of family life to hold and keep for ever when all the people who had come in and out had gone.

Stillness begets expectancy, otherwise why should she be holding her breath? The tea things were still on the garden table; they had been there when she came home from school. With a pang of remorse for having forgotten her, she thought of Katie, carefully carrying out cups and saucers one at a time.

Mrs Roper had evidently gone home. It was Maud's afternoon off. Father usually came home early on the day of his quarterly board meeting. He must have gone out again. Alex could be anywhere.

‘Mother!' She was not in any of the downstairs rooms. A house with doors and windows open and no one about can be a little eerie even when there is nothing to fear. A rose petal fell from the bowl on the hall table. Instinctively she removed it from the polished surface and held its velvet softness to her cheek as she went upstairs to change. The door of her room was open. With a little shock she found her mother there. She was sitting on the window-seat and looking down on the garden.

‘Mother!'

Sarah turned, her face wet with tears.

‘What's the matter? Is it Father – or Alex?'

‘No, no, they're all right, I think.' She managed a smile, sniffed, wept again. ‘I've been watching for you, longing for you to come home.'

‘Something has happened.' Some awful unspeakable thing?

Sarah leaned on the window-sill, her eyes on the rising ground beyond the garden where trees heavy with foliage were dark against a sky of fading gold.

‘I have loved it all so much,' she said. ‘I can't bear the thought of leaving. It will break my heart.'

CHAPTER IX

From the beginning Humbert had been at odds with the board of directors. As an agent he was an asset to the company: as a man he was a thorn in the flesh. He was certainly less respectful to his employers than would have been prudent in a man dependent entirely on his salary. By temperament and education he was disposed to take a more liberal view of the country's chief industry than to see as its main purpose the creation of wealth for its owners. The source of that wealth, he had once had the audacity to remind them, was two-fold: the coal and the men who mined it, the one inaccessible without the other.

Such heresies had alarmed and irritated the owners, especially Bedlow. Humbert's background alone made him suspect to a man who had started as a trapper at the age of seven and toiled his way up as pony-driver, putter, hewer, overman; had saved and studied and through sheer ruthless determination acquired a substantial holding in the company.

Humbert would have admitted to a genuine admiration for such a man, adding the proviso that he was impossible to work with. They had been at loggerheads over Humbert's insistence on improved safety levels, often expensive, on reasonable working hours, on the closure of dangerous seams and other measures favourable to the men. He had held his position because of his competence as a consultant engineer but also because of his skill in ironing out local difficulties. Managers, viewers and overseers liked and respected him. Less appreciated was his concern for the men on whom the industry depended.

But the more fair-minded of the directors would have acknowledged in private that Humbert's outspokenness, though resented at the time, had often been justified. He had more than once been proved right. He had a nose for coal and knew where it would be economic to lay out capital on boring and – more important to the diehards – where it would not.

As far back as 1921 he had seen the danger of government decontrol of wages and had not concealed his sympathy with the men during the ten-week lock-out. He had predicted that the resumption of mining in the Ruhr would end the boom in British coal. Sure enough, demand and prices fell. Men were laid off and one sixth of all pits were closed. Coal was sold at prices below cost. Feeling had been tense during the twenty-six agonizing weeks when the miners hung on after the General Strike ended. Whereas Humbert blatantly declared that the men were starved into submission, the owners, watching the source of their wealth decline, continued to insist on longer hours and a cut in wages.

Lord Laverborne, wealthiest of all the directors, had judiciously sold off three of his collieries. The remaining three yielded sufficient income from royalties, way-leaves and railway rents to maintain him in the manner to which he had been accustomed. He rarely attended meetings and happened to be abroad at the end of June 1928 and so missed the flare-up at the quarterly meeting.

Quite simply – it was unique: different from any board meeting of any kind ever known. Its course and outcome were shaped, not by Quinian, acting chairman and financial manager of Fellside's interests in an iron company, blast furnace and shipping line, not by Bedlow, whose glowering self-interest alone could defeat opposition, nor by his chief bugbear, Humbert, with his fancy theories – a chap who had never got his hands dirty nor put a penny into the company and – his unsuitability could be put no lower – an ex-parson.

What made it different from any other meeting was the presence of Katie Judd. Uninvited, her frail spirit insinuated itself into the boardroom. The gentlemen were no sooner seated than the agenda fell to pieces. The last item became the first as Bedlow, always a stranger to formality, produced a sheaf of papers and spread them on the table.

‘What I want to know' – his thick fingers trembled as he arranged the newspaper cuttings on the shining surface. He was an old and angry man. His fierce eyes under thick eyebrows glared at Humbert who sat at the lower end of the table. ‘What I want to know is who's going to be made responsible for this. I'll tell you who it should be. Them that didn't want Lucknow reopened even if there is coal there which those same people know there is. If my advice had been taken seven years ago, there'd have been a sinking in Larson's fields. By now we'd have had a fully operational pit there and yon old shaft would have been filled and levelled off as if it had never been there.'

The thrust went home. Humbert glanced at Quinian, received a despairing nod of permission and sprang to his own defence.

‘I advised against developing Lucknow, although there certainly is coal there. The minutes of the meeting will confirm that I also said that at some future time it might be an economically sound project if sufficient capital were available. My estimate of the possible cost was rejected out of hand' – he returned Bedlow's glare – ‘but was confirmed by the valuers. Penny pinching is not to be tolerated in this dangerous industry. Besides,' – as Bedlow opened his tightly compressed lips to interrupt – ‘there were legal difficulties as you well know. They haven't yet been resolved.'

He reminded them that Cosway, the original owner of the Lucknow Drift had worked it on lease. Under a clause in the agreement, if a lease expired and was not renewed, the lessee was obliged to give first option in disposing of buildings and equipment to the lessor and to restore all ground to an arable state. He was also legally bound to fill up pits of no further use or so to enclose them that they presented no danger. Ventilating shafts must be enclosed within a wall six feet high.

For a moment, as Edward paused unhappily, controversy was forgotten, all minds having turned to the tragic absence of one particular six-foot wall. But only for a moment.

‘If my advice had been taken, all that rubbish would have had to be cleared away seven years ago. Yon shaft would have been filled in and the ground levelled.' It was as if Bedlow had not been listening.

‘Besides the inadequacy of the proposed investment,' Humbert persisted, ‘there were other problems. Incidentally, there may have been a six-foot wall there. None of us was here in 1901 except perhaps Mr Bedlow.'

‘Who was the lessor?' Quinian addressed the question to Andrews, legal adviser to the board. He was a painstaking ambitious man of thirty-five and had come prepared, having immersed himself in the history of the Lucknow Drift.

‘The seven-year lease had been renewed six times but wasn't renewed in 1901. It was Cosway's responsibility to make all safe before the site was restored to the lessor, which he may have done, as Mr Humbert pointed out. A lot can happen to a wall in an exposed situation in getting on for thirty years.

‘Cosway died in 1902. His one daughter emigrated to New South Wales and married there. The lessor was Thomas Burdon, father of the present owner of Burdon's Drapery shop. In 1913 he sold the site to the owners of the Hope Carr colliery which was taken over in 1918 by the Fellside and District Coal Company.'

Having read from his notes, Andrews looked uneasily across at his friend Humbert.

‘So' – Bedlow's face was red with triumph and resentment – ‘this company has been responsible for that death-trap for ten years. If my advice had been taken—'

‘The company is also responsible for other death-traps, including those slums in Potter's Yard,' Humbert pointed out sharply, concealing his inner concern.

‘I seem to remember' – the speaker represented the bishopric of Elmdon, also a substantial shareholder in the company – ‘that there could be no development without an agreement with the owner of the land to the west of the Lucknow site and that he was unwilling to give wayleaves.'

Rilston. It was a decision he may have regretted, Humbert thought, considering Rilston's financial difficulties. He was sufficiently bothered to be grateful for the intervention. The fact remained that he himself should have kept the local managers on their toes though in managerial terms the Lucknow site belonged to none of the working collieries. A rotten industrial relic mouldering for years! He had not so much laid eyes on it until the recent tragedy. If he had bestirred himself to walk that way, he'd have been on to it like a shot. All his work, skill and acumen, all the cut and thrust of his battles with Bedlow counted for nothing in view of this one piece of negligence. It was a bitter moment.

Quinian in the chair rapidly restored the agenda. There was more than a chance that Bedlow would demand a reprimand. It would not be seconded: it was too unreasonable, but it would have to be entered in the minutes and might lead to a further enquiry and a demand for compensation. Who knew what might come to light? It was to be hoped that it would all blow over.

And so it might have done. When he had submitted his quarterly report Humbert paid less attention than he ought to the progress of the meeting. He was conscious of a peculiar mood. Concern, regret, loss of confidence in his much prized efficiency should have depressed him deeply: he was depressed. Yet a curious sensation came and went as if – to use a mining image – into a deep seam there came intermittent and dangerous flashes of light and heat. It was not long before he understood what was at work within him.