A Hint of Witchcraft (7 page)

An exasperated twist on the diagonally opposite corner of the carpet roused Margot from a rapturous daydream.

Miles kept his promise. He came on New Year's Eve and was sent out just before midnight; waited until the clock struck twelve, knocked, and was admitted – blushing and diffident – carrying a paper of salt in one hand and a gleaming lump of best Wallsend coal in the other.

Afterwards he and Margot drank their ginger wine together, braving the cold on the front doorstep and looking out into starlight unchanged through countless centuries since the custom began. With a touch of awe Miles was conscious of having taken part in an endless procession of men bringing coal out of the dark to placate the pagan gods of fire.

‘It's wonderful,' Margot said, the wonder embracing bare branches interlaced with stars, the closeness of Miles as he drew the shawl around her shoulders, the new year ready to unfold a succession of days more glamorous than days had ever been before. ‘Looking out into night is like looking into the year ahead and wondering what it will bring.'

‘I only hope you chose the right man to start it off and bring good luck.'

There was harmony between them, an interplay of light and shade; one confident that all would be well, the other daring to hope that nothing would go wrong.

CHAPTER VI

A spell of fine weather towards the end of June had ripened an unusually fine crop of strawberries in Miss Burdon's garden, a mixed blessing as with all soft fruit. Miss Burdon was at a loss as to what to do with them until she remembered that there would almost certainly be visitors at Monk's Dene over the weekend. Alex was coming home at the end of his second year at the university.

Her friendship with the Humberts owed less to congeniality than to long association. Burdons had supplied lawn and linen for Sarah's trousseau, and Miss Burdon herself had fashioned a boudoir cap for the bride, a confection of lace and satin ribbons which Sarah had never worn: it simply didn't stand up to Edward's ridicule. Nevertheless, Miss Burdon remained a family friend and the Humberts were her most valued customers, except perhaps for Mrs Rilston who from a sense of duty occasionally sent down for tapes, elastic, sateen linings and gingham for the maids' morning dresses. But one could scarcely offer strawberries to the Rilstons. Besides, the Humberts would probably offer to pick them.

Bella, the maid, had already started on the day's baking. Toria Link was unwillingly detached from her bucket and broom and sent down the lane to Monk's Dene. When she arrived at the open back door, Katie Judd was drying dishes in the scullery.

‘Missis says there are plenty of strawberries if Mrs Humbert wants them,' Toria said and vanished. She was sparing of speech, a sullen-tempered, homeless woman who did the heavy work at Burdons in exchange for her keep and a bed.

Katie carefully dried her hands and went to the morning-room. Fortunately the door there was also ajar. What to do about a closed door was still beyond Katie, much as she had improved in other ways. Three square meals a day and a tentative approach to security in being close to Miss Margot had made her less fey.

‘Missis says there are plenty of strawberries.…' She repeated the message correctly and added of her own accord, ‘Toria says.'

There was no one to hear but Margot who was altering the hem of a dress. No one else could have understood that the addition marked an advance: it could be described as an initiative on Katie's part.

‘Thank you, Katie.' She looked up. ‘You do look nice.'

The pink-checked aprons, each with a handkerchief pocket, had been her idea: she had made them herself. With her hair under control, in unfearful moments, Katie was almost – or at least one could see that she had been intended to be – like any other girl. She had been helping Mrs Roper in the kitchen for almost a year.

‘If only you'd take her on, Mrs Humbert,' Mrs Judd had brought herself to plead. ‘Nobody else will. Nobody that'd treat her right. And it's a worry not always knowing where she is or who might be after her for reasons you know as well as I do.'

Sarah knew them very well. It was more for Katie's protection than for any use she might be that she had taken her on; but in her limited way she did prove useful. Maud, the housemaid, accepted her quite graciously and Mrs Roper claimed that Katie saved her legs. She also washed the kitchen floor every blessed day and swept up every scrap and crumb the minute it landed if not before.

Margot gave her mind to the strawberries. They would have to be picked. Katie might help, but Miss Burdon did not look kindly on Katie. It would be better to send Katie to the farm for cream and she herself would do the picking. Linden would be arriving on the mid-morning bus. Would Linden enjoy strawberry-picking?

Neither Margot nor her mother knew how it had come about that Linden would be here when Alex came home. There had been time for Sarah's wariness to abate a little: it revived promptly when Linden arrived with an over-night bag.

‘You shouldn't have asked her to stay.'

‘I didn't. She must have thought.…'

The whispers in the hall ceased as Linden came downstairs, having left her things as usual in the room adjoining Margot's. It was immediately apparent that she would be of no use as a picker of strawberries: in her white blouse and skirt she must be kept well away from the merest drop of fruit juice.

‘You won't mind coming to Miss Burdon's? You can be looking for something to buy while I pick.'

At that moment there occurred another of those encounters that had been from time to time rather upsetting. Katie, with a dust-pan and brush, had crept from the kitchen, bent in both senses on sweeping under the morning-room table where there were sure to be crumbs from breakfast. The unexpected sight of Linden brought her to a halt in the old state of crazy alarm. She lowered her head, shrank against the wall and sidled back to the kitchen.

‘She doesn't change.' Linden's calm indifference was also unchanged. Such an exhibition of what she thought of as idiotic gibbering in no way threatened her apparently unshakeable poise. All the same, as a result of such incidents perhaps, Margot had sometimes sensed in Linden's attitude towards Katie something more than amused contempt; rather a veiled hostility. Certainly Katie's strange behaviour was unflattering and far from abating, it seemed to have increased.

It was better not to discuss Katie as they walked up Church Lane.

‘Isn't it nice – Miles is at home. He took me for a spin in his car yesterday – to Langland Priory. Such an interesting place. There's an empty house, Langland Hall, close to the ruins.…' She said it as casually as possible, as Linden might have done, without gushing about how heavenly it had been.

To enter Burdon's shop was to exchange the quiet of the village street for a deeper silence – a solemn hush between walls stacked high with bales of casement cloth and black serge. At each of the mahogany counters a tall hardwood chair invited the customer to perch, in an atmosphere heavy with the odours of fabric and furniture polish. The whole effect was weighty. Purchases were not to be made lightly.

If made at all. In the two years since the General Strike and the twenty-six weeks when the miners had stayed out, trade had been slow. Hours might pass without a single ring of the shop bell. With Bella far away in the kitchen and Toria on her knees in distant regions at the back, there was no sign of human life. Then presently would come a faint footfall on the thick carpet and Miss Burdon would appear.

But on this particular morning she was already there, unusually active and flushed with pleasure in the new delivery, conscious too of having taken a bold step. Carvers, drapers in Elmdon, had also suffered losses and had put up most of their stock for sale, intending to restock with cheaper goods for a less discriminating clientele. Such a sign of change, together with the rapid greying of her hair, had concentrated Miss Burdon's mind and made her reckless. She had dipped into her savings and bought up more of Carvers' stock than she could afford.

Both counters were strewn with lace-trimmed underwear, night-dresses, bed-jackets.… She had taken them lavishly from their boxes, ignoring the probability that most of them would be left on her hands for months if not for ever, and was actually humming ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes' as she checked items against the invoices.

The arrival of Margot and Linden raised her spirits still further: they were the very ones – the only ones – likely to buy and spread the word among their friends.

‘Because, of course, I can offer them at a slightly lower price than Carvers were asking. What do you think of these?'

Both girls admired a georgette scarf – and a white silk blue-sprigged blouse with a deep semi-circular flounce in place of a collar. The fashion was for low necklines scooped out in an oval or cut to a V and made more practical for daytime by the insertion of a modesty vest, a rectangle of silk of crêpe-de-Chine with concealed pins. The fashion was also for long strings of beads.

‘Pearls never date, do they?' Miss Burdon had taken two necklaces from their slim boxes. ‘And really the imitations are quite convincing enough for most people.' The remark was addressed with a smile almost roguish to Linden, as to an acknowledged arbiter of taste. ‘I shall keep them in their boxes until I have arranged the new stock and then they will look very well on the cabinet. Shall we try the effect?' She opened the glass door of the narrow cabinet standing on the counter and Linden draped the long, gleaming string of pearls on the black velvet, and it was Linden who offered to help with the checking when Margot tore herself away to the strawberry bed.

‘I'm almost at the end of the list. If you would read the item and put a tick when I've found it.' Miss Burdon handed her a pencil. ‘I've got as far as … two white lawn nightdresses with Richelieu-embroidered neck.…'

It was cool but stuffy between the high counters and the higher shelves. When the lists had been checked, Linden helped to fold the garments and put some of them back in their boxes. She was neat-fingered but languid, and when Miss Burdon retreated to the dining-room, murmuring something about coffee, she too abandoned the shop, leaving a froth of artificial silk and crêpe-de-Chine still on the counter, and drifted into the passage which formed the hall of the private house.

She was idly examining the rows of pictures on both walls when the shop-bell rang.

‘Do you mind seeing who it is, dear? I shan't be a minute,' Miss Burdon called from a stooping position as she reached for cups from the sideboard.

For Katie, Burdons' shop was alien territory fraught with every kind of hazard. She had been inside twice before, once with her mother, once with her sister, never alone. All the way up Church Lane she had been repeating her message and had it safe inside her head. Nothing else was safe.

The loud ring of the bell above her head made her tremble. Fearfully, she closed the door. The ringing stopped. The message was still there, ready to be said aloud. ‘Tell Miss Margot that Mr Miles is here. Would she like a trip to town?' She went slowly to the right-hand counter and waited, clutching the brass rim with both hands. It was smooth and cool and bright; the counter was covered with things she had never seen before, laces and ribbons and soft silk. There were shining white beads, too, like the ones in the glass case but not shut away, just lying there. Venturing the tip of one finger, she touched them, with her small cautious smile of pleasure in pretty things.

Suddenly someone else was there – in the doorway halfway down the shop and coming nearer. It wasn't Miss Margot or Miss Burdon. Katie knew who it was – all in white like the white things on the counter and with a pale unsmiling face and round it, heavy, dark hair. Cold eyes looked out at her from under thick, long-lashed eyelids.

That was what Katie saw, but she also felt in the part of her that warned her about things, a sour breath of enmity. Something came towards her that made a darkness in her, in her whole body. She drooped her head. It was safer not to look. She could not run, must not go until she had said her message.

‘Yes?' the cool voice said.

‘Tell Miss Margot.…' Katie covered her face with her hands and spoke the rest of her message into their protective shade.

‘What did you say?' Linden waited, then returned to the hall and so to the back door opening on the garden. ‘You're being asked for.'

Margot had filled the big bowl. She was hot, tired and sick to death of picking strawberries.

‘It's Katie. She's been struck dumb as usual.'

‘I'm coming. Tell her to wait while I wash my hands.'

Margot nipped into the kitchen, washed her hands, accepted from Bella a newly baked almond biscuit – and heard the shop-bell ring again. Miss Burdon heard it too. A second customer? But when she and Margot entered the shop together, except for Linden, it was empty. The second bell had signalled Katie's flight.

‘When I came back, she'd gone.' Linden's tone was one of patient resignation to the longeurs of the morning.

‘It isn't like her to go without saying why she came. She likes running errands.' Margot went out to the step. There was no sign of her. ‘I believe I know why she was sent. That's Miles's car. Would you excuse us, Miss Burdon, if we don't stay for coffee? May we come another time? And thank you so much for the strawberries. They're magnificent. Mother will be pleased.'

Miss Burdon was a little put out. She had twice expected a customer and it was only that tiresome Katie Judd, a half-wit who didn't know what she was doing most of the time. People like that should be put away. Miss Burdon would have enjoyed entertaining the two girls to coffee. She was fond of Margot, indeed of any young people whom it was suitable and not too exacting to be fond of. She folded three pairs of flesh-coloured cami-knickers and returned them to their boxes, feeling all at once in the need of a little fresh air.