A Hint of Witchcraft (22 page)

Such speculations, endlessly repeated, were comforting and might have proved so for years to come. It was Lily Hart who cast a new light on the matter and raised questions of a different kind.

Lily was the daughter of the landlord of the Halfway House Inn on the Elmdon road, a pretty, pleasant, idle, slovenly girl whom Mrs Judd was always warning Ewan against on the grounds that she had never done a day's work in her life and was no better than she should be. These demerits were counter-balanced to some extent by Lily's claim to have second sight. Nobody believed her but she was sure of an audience when she read the teacups or the cards.

At the end of June, on the anniversary of Katie's death, a few friends dropped in at Clint Lane, including Mrs Roper who lived next door, and Lily. When tea was over she reached for Mrs Judd's cup, inverted it in the saucer, turned it three times and held it in long, grimy, beringed fingers.

‘Well, I don't know I'm sure.…'

But Lily disregarded Mrs Judd's protest and bent her unkempt mop of dark curls over the upturned cup.

‘There's something missing. There's cause for searching here.' She paused, looked raptly up at the ceiling and down again into the cup. ‘There's looking for something – or someone. No, it isn't Katie, bless her, she's dead and gone. Not someone. It's a thing. Something lost.'

‘Nothing that I know of.' Mrs Judd was firm, and when Lily had gone and the undoubted thrill diminished, ‘If there's any searching to be done, it's her that should be finding something useful to do. A bit of soap wouldn't come amiss either.'

‘I'll tell you one thing though.' Emily spoke slowly as if newly awakened. ‘There is something missing. Them beads. Nobody knows what happened to them. What did she do with them?'

It was a new line of thought demanding a more careful reconstruction of Katie's last day.

‘She didn't have them on her when we went to Humberts' to fetch her home, I'll swear to that,' Mrs Judd said. ‘And I wish to God I'd brought her away instead of leaving her there. The only pocket she had was in her apron and I'd have seen them. Anyway if she'd had them she would have given them to me when I told her to. Didn't she always do as she was told?'

There would have been time for her to hide the beads after she left the shop and before she joined Mrs Roper in the kitchen. But where? At Monk's Dene? Mrs Roper didn't think so: every cupboard, nook and cranny had been emptied and scrubbed clean when the Humberts left. In any case there had been other people about. Katie, last seen crouching by the dining-room door, could not have gone anywhere else. There was no knowing when she had left or where she had gone or when she had reached the chimney.

‘She should have been better looked after, my own poor bairn. I'll never forgive myself for leaving her.'

Someone tactfully changed the subject by remembering that Mrs Robson had felt the same when she had forgotten to put up the fireguard and her six-year-old Georgie had fallen into the fire. The comparison was comfortless but it diverted attention from Katie.

Interest in the missing beads, however, once roused, spread to every household in Ashlaw. Were they still under a hedge, or in a hollow tree, or hidden in the clutter of any one of a dozen backyards? For a while, looking for Katie's beads became a game for a few of the more imaginative children. The notion that they might be in the chimney, now unapproachable in its barbed-wire cage, gave to the chimney itself a different character – mysterious and gruesomely romantic, fit scene for the birth of a local legend. Alex's prediction that a forbidden place might over the years become sacred was on the way to being fulfilled.

But for the Judds and their neighbours the questions, ‘What did she do with the beads? What
would
she do with them?' suddenly became obsolete: an entirely different question took their place.

*   *   *

On an evening in October, Mrs Judd sat in the rocking-chair with her feet on the fender. Firelight filled the room. The tea was already laid, a special tea with pineapple chunks and evaporated milk. Rob, on arriving home the night before, had produced a whole ham from his kit-bag, the first ever to grace the family table. For herself Mrs Judd asked no more than the simple luxury of half an hour with nothing to do.

‘Draw the curtains, Emily, and let's have a bit of peace before they come.'

Emily paused to glance out at the twilit landscape. The flush of sunset had faded. Nothing could be seen of the village below but a few yellow gas lamps at the far end of the main street. At such times Clint Lane seemed to breast the darkening world as if sailing in air towards the western fells.

‘The nights are putting in.' She twitched the brown casement-cloth curtains together.

‘It's always about now when it's getting dark that I think of her. It's as if I'm still looking for her to come home.'

‘It's been over a year.' Emily sat down on the other end of the wide fender. ‘And it could have been yesterday.'

She too was free for a while though not for the best of reasons. The caller had been round with his crake the night before, intoning the bad news: ‘Hope Carr pit idle the morn.' She'd had Sam under her feet all day, but she had at least been spared one night's battle with the pit clothes and the filling and emptying of the bath. They were saying that there'd be baths at the pit-head some day – not a day too soon, although some of the men, Sam for one, reckoned they'd stick to their own bath-tub in front of their own fire. Having him at home for the day meant a drop in the weekly pay packet. On the other hand she had been able to slip out, leaving him to keep an eye on Stanley. A brief escape from the male members of the family, one of them half a Judd, was not to be despised.

It was at such quiet times in the blessed warmth, the shabby room enriched by the crimson and gold of leaping flames, that they talked about Jo, the father whom Emily had almost forgotten; about Katie who was his favourite because she most needed to be favoured; about Rob who was too lavish with his money, especially now when trade was slack and he might not always be sure of a berth; about Ewan and whether he was going steady with Bella Capfield.

Bella, formerly Miss Burdon's maid, had soon had enough of the Penny Bazaar in Elmdon, of draughts from the ever open doors, chilly waiting for buses, the day-long absence from Ashlaw, the late return home.

‘He could do worse than settle down with Bella,' his mother said. ‘She's somebody we know.'

It would have been difficult not to know Bella and all her family who lived four doors further along Clint Lane.

‘She's fallen on her feet getting that place at Bainrigg House. They've both gone up in the world, her and our Ewan.' They heard the sputter of a motor cycle as it slowed down at the back gate. ‘That'll be him now.'

She moved the kettle from the hob to the cross-bar. By the time it boiled Rob had arrived and – breathlessly – Bella, who had to be back at the House in just over an hour. In the comfortable aftermath of a satisfying meal, Mrs Judd returned to the rocking chair, Emily to the fender with a final cup of tea; the others remained at the table. Ewan lit a Woodbine, Rob a pipe. Bella turned the pages of the late Mrs Judd's photograph album. She enjoyed looking at the Victorian forbears of the Judds more immediately at hand and saw the album as a sign of respectability – and she was right. The gold watch-chains, feather boas and wide-brimmed hats, the mittened hands and bearded chins evoked more prosperous days when mining boomed. Jo had been less fortunate than his father and grandfather and since his death the family had gone further downhill.

There was only one photograph of the present generation, taken when Jo joined up fourteen years ago. Father standing, mother seated, Emily with twin plaits, Rob and Ewan in sailor suits, all unsmiling and strongly united – and in her mother's lap.…

‘Here's Katie.'

She had moved and spoiled the picture. Her features were blurred. Consequently it was to Katie that the eye was immediately drawn. The uneasy tilt of the head seen as though through a mist and the light hair more than ever like gossamer, intensified the impression she had given in life, one of strangeness, of not belonging.

‘Let me see.'

Bella leaned towards Mrs Judd, holding out the album.

‘I wish there's been a proper photo of her.' Mrs Judd outlined the group with her finger. ‘When we're all gone there'll be no one to remember what she was like and nothing left to show that she was ever here.'

In the silence they all remembered her or tried to.

‘You're wrong there, Mother.' Since he had taken to a pipe Rob felt entitled to be – and was – respected as head of the family. ‘There's a good chance that Katie'll be the one to be remembered when all the rest of us are forgotten.'

‘Folk'll remember the funeral,' Emily said.

‘And those white things hanging in the church,' Bella added. They had made her rather nervous.

‘They likely will,' Mrs Judd said bitterly. ‘And if anybody asks who they were for, they'll say, “Katie Judd, the girl that stole the beads”. And why she did it and what she did with them I'll never know.' She set the chair rocking and stared unhappily into the fire.

‘You're sure,' Emily appealed to Bella, ‘they couldn't still be somewhere in the shop, ravelled up in any of the things?'

Bella assured her for the twentieth time that she and Miss Burdon had shaken every bit of underwear and crawled about on the floor without finding anything but a farthing and a fair amount of dust.

‘Not a sign of them. They must be somewhere else. It's like one of those mysteries you read about,' she concluded. ‘What the poor little soul did with them will never be known.'

It sounded final, the way she put it. There seemed nothing more to be said until Ewan spoke the words that changed everything. After the pause his voice was sudden and loud.

‘If she ever took them,' he said.

*   *   *

It was a thunderbolt. The small room vibrated.

‘Well, I'm damned.' Rob solemnly laid down his pipe. ‘How do we know she ever took them at all?'

‘Because old Sally Burdon said she did.' Ewan was as shaken by his own perception as by its implications. Their anger against Miss Burdon had been for her heartless treatment of Katie, leading to her death; the accusation she made had not been questioned.

‘Somebody must have took them,' Emily said.

‘If Katie didn't take them, who did?' Rob demanded.

The temperature of the room, already high, rose higher but the general mood became less sombre. A thief, still unknown, could be hunted down and dealt with; Katie's name could be cleared.

‘Well, I hope none of you think it was me.' The threat of united action was so strongly to be felt that Bella was alarmed.

‘What a thing to say,' Mrs Judd was reassuring.

‘I was in the kitchen the whole morning baking until she called me to come into the shop to help to look for them.'

‘Somebody could have come in and nicked them when the shop was empty,' Rob pointed out.

‘We'd have heard the bell.'

‘So there was nobody there but you and Sally Burdon and Katie.'

‘And Miss Margot. But she was picking strawberries all the time. She came into the kitchen to wash her hands – and she took one of my almond biscuits. I mean' – Bella looked round, unnerved by the battery of four pairs of dark attentive eyes – ‘nobody could think Miss Margot.…'

‘What do you take us for, Bella Capfield?' Mrs Judd was stern. ‘Nobody in the world was kinder to our Katie than Miss Margot. Katie thought the world of her. If somebody took those beads and let Katie take the blame and go to her death, it was somebody as different from Miss Margot as two humans can be. Somebody that would let Katie suffer and not care.… Mind what you're doing' – the reproof was automatic as Ewan stubbed out his cigarette on his saucer – ‘that's my best tea-set as well you know.'

‘I wish I had my hands on whoever it was.' A phrase his mother had used stirred a memory as if the guilty stranger, undreamt of a minute ago, already existed in flesh and blood and hovered, waiting to be identified.

‘What about Toria Link?' Mrs Judd ventured.

Rob had never heard of her and Emily couldn't remember ever having seen her. Mrs Judd had seen her only once when she went to Miss Burdon's back door to collect a quilt for washing. It was Bella who came to the door, but she had caught sight of Toria Link going into the wash-house with a bucket. Why Miss Burdon had wanted her to wash the quilt when her other washing was done at home, she couldn't say, except that there was nowhere like Clint Lane for drying. As a matter of fact the quilt had dried in two days on her line: there happened to be a good strong wind. In the village as a whole, Toria Link was known but no one knew her personally. What would she want with pearl beads?

‘She could sell them,' Rob said.

‘And lose her job and the only home she had if she was found out?' Bella alone knew one or two things about Toria. ‘Anyway she was never allowed in the shop. Miss Burdon made that clear when she first came. There was a notice in the window for rough cleaning – and she turned up. It looked as if she had walked from Elmdon but she started on the scullery straight away.' Bella had been sorry for her and had slipped her a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake when Miss Burdon was upstairs playing the piano. ‘But she was always at the back. With it being carpets in the shop there was no scrubbing there and you know as well as I do that Luke Farshaw had the cleaning of the shop windows for years and his father before him.'

‘Ewan knows Toria Link. He's at the Hall now.'

‘You can count her out.' They saw that he was serious. His face had flushed. ‘She wouldn't do it. She's religious for one thing.'