A Hint of Witchcraft (35 page)

‘You had something else to tell,' Margot reminded him as they were about to part in Elmdon. ‘You know of someone who isn't happy?'

‘An old friend I came across in the Masonic Nursing Home. She asked after you and is anxious to see you. She hasn't much time left.…'

*   *   *

‘Miss Burdon?'

The meagre figure in the narrow white bed was barely recognizable as the buxom woman who had once loomed so large.

‘Only a few minutes.' The nurse placed a chair. ‘It's Miss Humbert, dear.'

‘Margot.' The voice had not changed. Still deep, it emanated from the wasted body as if it didn't belong there.

‘Lance told me that you were here. I'm sorry you've been so poorly.'

The fleshless cheeks and sunken red-rimmed eyes, together with the falsely bright manner of the nurse, were ominous.

‘You and Lance. So suitable. I should give you a wedding present but I'm not in a position.…' She paused for breath. ‘Only best wishes. I made a boudoir cap for your mother when she married.'

‘I still have it, Miss Burdon.' The monstrous creation of lawn, lace and satin ribbons had been a problem when she dealt with her mother's things. It fitted none of the categories of disposable objects – was too grand, too well preserved in its original tissue paper to be consigned to the dustbin. ‘And it's as good as new.'

‘Happier days!' Her eyes wandered as if in search of something she had forgotten, to the door, the edge of the screen, to Margot. She stirred uneasily on her rampart of pillows. Against their insistent whiteness her face was grey, her nose thin and sharp. ‘Such a surprise to see Lance again and I thought, there's Margot. I'll tell Margot. Now that your mother is gone, there's no one else to tell. I've thought of it so much. For years.'

‘You want me to do something for you?'

‘Not now. Not until I'm gone, too. I can't face any more.… If anything could be done about it, I should be the one … but I can't.' Her mouth drooped. She whispered. ‘It's no good. I can't.'

‘There's no need for you to do anything except try to get well.'

‘After I'm dead, it won't matter then. If I tell you, Margot, you can decide what to do. They've been on my mind so long.'

Some inkling of what they might be filled Margot with alarm. Was Miss Burdon by virtue of her feebleness and distress about to trap her once more in the maze she had wandered through, left behind and for the past few months forgotten?

‘Do you remember the beads that were missing – and all the fuss? It made me ill, you know. I had to stay indoors, a prisoner in my own house, but I could hear what they were shouting outside – and my windows were broken.…'

‘It isn't good for you to talk. The nurse said—'

‘I think I suffered a slight stroke and should have called in the doctor but I soldiered on. After they went away it was quiet and dark with the shutters closed.' She had had ample time to go through her stock which was to be sold to a travelling agent for a cut-price firm in Manchester. ‘All good quality. And that was how I found them.'

The silence was long enough to penetrate even Miss Burdon's limited awareness. Margot was aware of her growing uneasiness but could feel no sympathy.

‘You found the beads and didn't tell?' she said at last.

‘I dared not tell. Not after what happened.'

After what had happened to Katie? Was she thinking of that or of saving her own thick skin? At the sight of her, a poor sick creature near her end, Margot's anger cooled. She forced herself to speak quietly.

‘What did you do with them?'

‘I didn't know what to do. There they were in their box on the shelf. I must have put them away and forgotten, then looked for them on the counter.' She dared not harbour them in the house or shop and in her panic had wanted only to be rid of them and escape the consequences of having made ‘all the fuss' for nothing. ‘I took them up the garden and dropped them over the gate. No one ever goes there but if they were found it would look as if.…' Her eyelids drooped.

‘As if the person who stole them had dropped them there? You wanted us to go on thinking that Katie had taken them?'

‘What else could I do?' Slow tears found their way down her grey cheeks. ‘I was so frightened and I've been afraid ever since in case it was somehow found out that I had made a mistake. But now that I've told you, it's a weight off my mind. You will know what to do.' However sluggish her conscience, however shallow her remorse, her distress at least was genuine. ‘After all, that's what it was, wasn't it? Just a mistake. A simple mistake.'

With an effort Margot took her hand.

‘Yes,' she said as gently as she could. ‘It was a mistake and you have suffered for it.'

*   *   *

She was not the only one to have suffered. It should have been heartening to know that neither Katie, Toria nor Linden had stolen the beads. No one had stolen the beads. But as she left the nursing home, Margot was too deeply absorbed in the implications of Miss Burdon's confession to be other than disheartened, however perversely. It was small comfort to know that untimely deaths, sad partings and bitter misunderstandings had resulted, not from a theft, but from the mere suspicion of a theft, to feel that she had been lured into a wild-goose-chase of a particularly painful, indeed tragic kind, and that all her thinking had been based on error.

At the station she bought a ticket and having remembered nothing of the journey, left the train at Ashlaw. She was the only person to alight and the road to the village a quarter of a mile away was deserted. Hawthorns were in bloom, hedges adrift in white cow-parsley. She walked slowly, still in the abstraction of a sleep-walker.

And then – was it the air, fresh and fragrant – or the change of scene – or the movement? She could not have told at what point or by what mingling of memory, deduction and intuition it dawned on her that in confessing her mistake, Miss Burdon had confessed to the wrong mistake. Enlightenment came with a mental picture of pearl beads draped on black velvet. Miss Burdon had forgotten, as she herself had forgotten, that there had been two strings of beads.

‘Shall we try the effect?' She remembered the rather pathetic girlishness in Miss Burdon's voice as she opened the cabinet. Linden had arranged the beads inside. But they were not to be kept there on display, not until the new stock had been rearranged. Afterwards, having put them away, Miss Burdon would look for the other string on the counter and fail to find it. And then – it could have been weeks later – alone in the dim light behind the shutters, taking stock, she would find the beads in their case on the shelf. ‘A slight stroke', a gap in consciousness, solitude, worry over the loss of her business would account for much more than a lapse of memory.

The beads in Rosie's treasure box were not the stolen beads. The pieces slipped back into place; the puzzle was once more as nearly complete as it could ever be with one important piece still missing. It was wrong to think of it as a return to normality. All the same, Margot's spirits rose. Knowing full well that it would mean concealing half of the truth and misrepresenting the other half with the duplicity she had so strongly condemned in Linden, she also knew what must be done.

When Miss Burdon died (poor Miss Burdon, her mistake was pardonable though her treatment of Katie was not) the Judds must be told that the beads had been found. Katie's name would be cleared. It would be known throughout Ashlaw and beyond that Miss Margot had heard it from old Sally Burdon's own lips as she passed away. The Judds and their neighbours would appreciate a death-bed confession. Its aura of drama would be similar to that of ghosts and evil-doing. Evil had been done, as Mrs Dobie had perceived, though it might never be known by whom.

In exonerating Katie, she would also be exonerating two others, one of whom would know that the beads had not been found. It would be interesting to see Toria's reaction to Miss Burdon's confession. Linden had slipped gracefully out of earshot. Should the news ever reach her, it would be received with composure – and politely, of course. Which of them was guilty? In her unique role of judge and jury, in the absence of evidence, knowing them both, Margot was almost sure that it was not Linden, who had other ways of acquiring personal adornments – and of a more expensive kind.

It was Toria whom she simultaneously condemned and pardoned. In her most wretched state she had seemed to find a means of retribution. Her thinking had been tortuous and incomplete: she had not foreseen – how could she? – that whoever suffered from her action it would not be Linden. Toria on the other hand had doomed herself to pangs of conscience it would be hard to assuage, even though night after night she climbed the crooked stair to her narrow room and prayed for forgiveness – which very likely she did. Yet she had not started the landslide. The first pebble had been dislodged when Linden brought her to her knees on a muddy pavement in Elmdon years ago.

And Katie? There came the rustle of wings in the hedge, the distant clang of the church bell. Margot half-turned as she had often done to find Katie just behind her, frail and light as one of the flowering stems that trembled as she passed. For an instant she was almost there again, her lips parting in a cautious smile; her eyes frightened: a changeling in the wicked mortal world. But as long as Ashlaw folk told stories by the fire it was Katie who would be remembered with regret by those who mourned the death of innocence. Long after Rosie Larson grew up and left the farm, the ghost of a girl who went to her death wrongly accused would haunt Lucknow Meadow.

In its long history Ashlaw had no doubt acquired its share of shameful secrets. She herself held one minute morsel of secret knowledge, a tiny fragment to add to the sum of wrongs as numerous as the grains of sand on all the sea-shores of the world. The notion intrigued her. It confirmed her sense of belonging.

And after all it was a village where the most active life went on under the surface. A hundred fathoms beneath her feet men were toiling in the dark while she stood waist-deep in flowers. A lark was singing; lilac in Larsons' garden would be coming into bloom. The contrasts could never be reconciled, nor ever forgotten, but perhaps they could be shared. There was so much to do. There was nowhere else in the world where she wanted to be.

Margot drew a deep breath and discovered the enchantment of maytime in a country lane, hedges white with blossom and Queen Anne's lace. The effect was bridal. She remembered that she was gloriously happy; knew that Lance would not be far away.

In the garden at Monk's Dene, the pear tree had shed its petals on the path. Wild roses would soon be flowering on the high wall. It was as if the years of exile had never been: as if there had been no interruption in the familiar cycle of seasons, no threat to the secure sequence of days. That was an illusion, but absence had served to intensify the happiness of coming back. She remembered with yearning how her mother had loved the place. To the memories it held they would add more, with a blessed sense of continuity in a world of change.

From the gateway where there had once been a rustic arch, she looked across the lane towards the War Memorial.

‘You're shivering.'

He had come quietly. She felt his arm around her without surprise. He was always there when she needed him.

‘I was remembering.'

In its hollow between trees the memorial, once large and awe-inspiring, was unexpectedly slender and vulnerable.

‘That faint line.' Margot peered and pointed. ‘Can you see? It isn't a crack?'

‘Not yet.'

In time it would come. Like the Quaker schoolroom and the old rectory, the column would tilt, sink and crumble, taking the names of all the dead soldiers with it into oblivion. Katie was right. Nothing on earth was safe, not even the earth itself.

And yet, in recompense, how beautiful it was – with sunlight shimmering on young leaves in the sheltered garden and the old house awaiting their return.

Also by Anna Gilbert

Images of Rose

The Look of Innocence

A Family Likeness

Remembering Louise

The Leavetaking

Flowers for Lilian

Miss Bede Is Staying

The Long Shadow

A Walk in the Wood

The Wedding Guest

The Treachery of Time

A HINT OF WITCHCRAFT
. Copyright © 2000 by Anna Gilbert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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ISBN 0-312-19984-8

First published in Great Britain by Robert Hale Limited

First U.S. Edition: August 2000

eISBN 9781466873551

First eBook edition: May 2014