A Hint of Witchcraft (23 page)

‘She went neither to church nor chapel,' his mother reminded him.

‘Likely she hadn't decent clothes to go in. You can be religious without going to church or chapel. She's read the Bible. She talks like the Bible, about sins and that. Anyway, what about them that do go? Sally Burdon went to church regular, didn't she?'

His heavy sarcasm was impressive.

‘If there was nobody there but Katie, Miss Margot, Bella and Toria Link and no other customer came in—' Rob was interrupted.

‘Wait a minute.' Bella had clapped her hand to her mouth in self-rebuke. ‘There was somebody else: Miss Margot's friend.'

The pause was pregnant with surprise, hope, dismay and conjecture.

‘I never saw her but she might have been in the shop while Miss Margot was in the garden. When I went into the dining-room to set the lunch, there were three cups on the sideboard. Missis had been meaning to give them coffee.'

Which friend? There had always been young people at Monk's Dene. Several girls of Miss Margot's age came often enough to be recognized. On this particular morning Bella had not seen the girl in question. When she was helping to look for the beads, Miss Burdon had mentioned that Miss Margot's friend had helped to check the invoices – and what a delightful girl she was. Then had come the fuss and bother when they failed to find the beads and the worry because Miss Burdon was so sure that Katie had taken them. Bella had ‘lived-in' at Burdons' and didn't even know that Katie was missing until the next morning when she heard that the poor little thing was dead. What with one thing and another she'd never given a thought to who else might have been in the shop until they had started talking about it just now.

‘There was no friend at Humberts' when we went there. Not that we saw anyway,' Emily recalled. ‘I wonder where she'd gone, whoever she was.'

‘Gone off to hide the beads.' Rob's suggestion was intended to lighten the atmosphere. It was not taken seriously. Not yet.

‘Let me think.' Mrs Judd thought back to the two terrible days she had tried to forget. In the evening, while Katie was missing, Miss Margot had come twice to the door to ask for news. ‘I was unpegging the line, I remember. The first time, Mr Miles was with her. They were going Bainrigg way.' The second time, she was ironing. It was getting dark. She had gone to the door to speak to Miss Margot and beyond, in the lane, saw Mr Alex and a young lady in white.

Ewan looked up sharply. For a while he had not spoken, apparently lost in thought. If his mother had been paying attention she would have recognized his expression and known what it portended: an inward simmering liable at any minute to boil over. He had, in fact, been struck by her earlier remark, that if somebody else had taken the beads it would be somebody who would let Katie suffer and not care. He knew of one such person – the only one – who could behave as if other people didn't matter, as if they had no feelings. And now – Mr Alex and a young lady in white. Who else could be with Mr Alex?

‘That's her,' he said. ‘That Miss Grey. If she was at Ashlaw the day Katie was missing, she must have been the one in the shop.'

‘It makes you think,' Rob began, when they had all shared similar thoughts in a brief silence.

‘It sounds as if she's the only one that could've.… I mean if Katie didn't.'

‘Now don't say anything you'll be sorry for, our Emily.'

‘He's right though, Mother. I'm not saying she did take them but she's the sort that would take anything she wanted, choose what. I know a bit about her and one thing I know is that Katie was frightened of her. It's a long time ago now.…' He told them how Katie had rushed into his arms as if running away as Miss Grey followed her out of the Humberts' gate. ‘I'd seen her in Elmdon that very same day.' They listened with indignation to his account of the pedlar's scattered goods – the mud – the total loss – Miss Grey's complaint to the policeman.

‘But would anyone as posh as that pinch beads?' Rob asked.

‘The posh ones are the worst.' Ewan was sure of it. From the start he had identified Miss Grey as one of the upper class who should be done away with – all of them. ‘They're nothing but a sink of corruption.'

It was felt to be strong language. It was also felt instinctively that caution was needed before conclusions were jumped to when the upper classes were involved.

‘Mrs Roper would know if she was the friend that was at Monk's Dene that day. Shall I ..?' Emily reached for the poker, intending to knock on the fire-back.

‘No, don't knock. She might be busy with Ben. He's been real poorly this week.'

Bella offered to slip round and ask her and in a few minutes returned with Mrs Roper, Ben having found relief in sleep after a spell of battling for breath. A chair was squeezed into the space between the fender and the treadle machine. The situation was explained.

‘Well, what a going-on! Do you mean to tell me we've been blaming that poor dead girl for what she didn't do?'

‘We don't know,' Rob said, ‘but we damned well want to find out.'

Casting her mind back and remembering that she had run up to Clint Lane to give warning that Miss Burdon was on the war path, Mrs Roper arrived circuitously at an answer to the question ‘Was Miss Grey there that day?'

‘She wasn't in the house when Katie came back from the shop, I'm nearly sure.' Katie had crept into the kitchen. She had been running; even with the table between them she had felt the girl's heart beating. Katie hadn't said a word but then she hardly ever did. Maud was upstairs making up a bed for Miss Grey although they hadn't been sure if she would come. Downstairs, she thought, there was only Mrs Humbert.

‘Isn't it sad, her gone – and at her age? What would she be? Still in her forties?'

‘And Miss Margot?' Rob headed her off from a line of thought liable to stretch indefinitely.

‘She came back with strawberries. She and Katie went into the dairy. Just the two of them, quiet and peaceful, pulling the stalks off. Very likely that was the last bit of happiness Katie ever knew.'

‘It seems funny,' Emily said, ‘that Miss Grey wasn't there. Where was she?'

A picture gradually took shape – its colours murky – of Miss Grey at large. Doing what? And where? There was no background to the picture.

‘We'll never know.' Mrs Judd leaned back in her chair, resigned. ‘It would take a miracle to clear it up.'

‘There's somebody at the back door.'

It was Emily who spoke but they were all in a mood to be startled by the knock. The handle turned.

‘Don't say a word,' Mrs Judd warned, ‘whoever it is.'

‘Can I come in?' It was Mrs Larson, her cheeks fresh and glowing from the cool night air.

‘You've never been turned from my door yet, Nancy Larson, and I've known you all your life.' A general moving up and adjustment of persons to available space left room for her at the table. ‘I'd forgotten it was Thursday. You could have come for your tea.'

Nancy had been at the Chapel Guild. It was the highlight of her week.

‘I thought I'd pop in for a minute, but you've no need of company when you've got your family round you. All but one and she's with us in memory.' The guileless remark played havoc with Mrs Judd's warning. As she hesitated, Rob took charge.

‘We were talking about Katie. I didn't get home until two days after it happened.…'

‘And we were telling him about the day when' – Emily was reluctant to mention the theft – ‘when we saw her for the last time.'

‘Except that no one seems to know much about it, such as when she went to the chimney.'

‘If she came our way, no one saw her. Mind you, there's plenty of ways she could have got to the chimney over the fields. But not a man, woman or child passed the farm all day except the ones I told the police about at the time. The young folks from Monk's Dene and Mr Miles.'

The day had been more interesting than most. She had stood at the window two or three times to watch them go past: Mr Miles going to the village in the afternoon; then the four of them walking to Bainrigg at about milking time.

‘The four of them?'

‘Miss Margot and Mr Miles. They called to ask if we'd seen Katie. The other two went by just after. Mr Alex and the other young lady.' And oh yes, she had passed the farm earlier in the afternoon on her way to the village. All by herself. Dressed all in white.

The phrase was becoming significant: it had a falling cadence: it was memorable: it isolated the wearer from other folk. In the listeners – and they were a tough lot – it produced a superstitious tremor.

‘Oh, her!' Bella's tone was more eloquent than words.

‘So that's where she was,' Ewan burst out when the door had closed behind Mrs Larson. ‘What was she doing up there all by herself? When she went past the farm, that was the time when Katie went missing, wasn't it?'

‘It's a funny thing she wasn't seen coming up from the village, only going back. She can't have come up along the Lane or somebody would have seen her.'

The subject was inexhaustible. Amid the vagueness, the endless wondering, the hopeless attempt to drop it and talk of something else, one image persisted – of a young lady dressed in white who had walked alone, who must have passed the chimney where Katie's body was found. The only person known to have been in the vicinity at the time; the only other person to have been in the shop when the beads disappeared; the only person to supply an answer to the question, ‘If Katie didn't take the beads, who did?'

Bella's hour was up. She closed the album, squeezed her way round the table, went into the scullery for her coat and came back to put it on.

‘You'll have to come with me, Ewan. I dursn't go past that chimney by myself in the dark.'

‘Whatever she did or didn't do' – Mrs Judd's mind was still on the young lady in white – ‘I don't like the sound of her.'

Her summing up left Miss Grey at a distance like a dubious historical figure whose suspected misdeeds could never be confirmed – until Bella brought her abruptly nearer.

‘Whether you like her or not, you'll likely be seeing a lot more of her. As sure as I'm standing here she's setting her cap at Mr Miles. She'll be mistress of Bainrigg House one of these days. Just you wait.'

CHAPTER XVII

Rumours spread quickly in Ashlaw. Suspicions once breathed in the privacy of the Judds' cramped living-room crept into the outer air. Borne on the famous breezes of Clint Lane, they found their way to other firesides, to be whispered and adapted to taste. But a central theme persisted: it had been found out that Katie Judd did not steal those beads. (It transpired that no one had ever believed that she did.) Who had stolen them? The young woman now a frequent visitor at Bainrigg House had something to do with it. She had even – at this point voices were so low as to be barely audible – had something to do with Katie's death.

Apart from the compulsion to pass the word on, there was nothing to be done. The sinister relish of the tales provoked no action, except on one occasion when the young woman in question appeared in the main street on her way to the post office. Children playing on the pavement were called or dragged indoors, the doors firmly closed. It was said that she was only sending a telegram on behalf of Mrs Rilston. Could you believe it when there were three maids and an under-gardener to run messages?

Strange things had happened. Nell Bowes who used to live in the end house in Clint Lane swore that she had gone into her backyard early one morning and seen Katie running across the field
after she was dead.
In pink, and fair-haired. It was enough to make your blood run cold. The Bowes had since moved to Fellside where Harry worked. It was now obvious that they had gone because Nell had been frightened nearly to death by seeing the ghost. Her mother had died of heart failure.

It was on the very day after the Judds' family gathering that a more reliable version of their suspicions reached Langland Hall, to raise ripples of unrest in that quiet backwater.

Langland was at its most colourful in autumn. Throughout the centuries of its ruin by Picts and Scots and Danes, by dissolution and desecration, it had undergone a gentler intrusion. Rowan and birch, sycamore and thorn had quietly occupied the remains of frater and chapel; bramble and elder now softened the tumbled stones marking the outline of nave and refectory. Robbed of its earlier riches, the priory had never known a richer display of crimson, copper and gold than on a still day in October.

The stillness of stones and trees was matched by the stillness of the woman who sat in a sheltered embrasure facing south. She felt the faint warmth of the sun on her face and hands. Her inner response to the beauty of her surroundings had in it a touch of reverence: for her the scene was hallowed. But she also felt its sadness. Every leaf, having reached a glorious end, must fall. The blaze of colour was that of a funeral pyre.

The touch of melancholy was characteristic, but Toria was herself far from sad. The peace which had fallen on the priory and on its surrounding fields and woods had fallen on her too. She too had mellowed and was aware of the merciful change. From this sunlit niche she could review not only the Hall and the cottages below but the whole course of her life before she came there: its early quietude and promise of continuing simple comfort, the disaster that had uprooted and almost destroyed her and the years of penance, the miraculous transition to a way of life that answered all her needs.

With the mellowing had come the slow revival of a lost faculty: the power of loving. It had withered and died in the frost of betrayal, leaving a bitterness she had never hoped – or wanted – to overcome. But gradually in the past months it had passed from her, not forgotten but outgrown. Edward Humbert's enterprise had not been, as he now feared, entirely ill-starred: it had given new hope to the one unfortunate woman who most needed it.