Black Heather (10 page)

“You’ll not touch him, Pat! I know what you’re about, selling the place out in such a fashion, and to an outlander! It’s all of a piece with the rest. It’s to keep me out. You’re not satisfied now you’ve got my Macrae stopped. What’s next in this place of horror?”

None of this made any intelligence to me except to restore my suspicions—first of Jassy, then of Patrick—but precisely what these suspicions were I did not yet know.

Patrick watched her in a fashion that would have done credit to Timothy pursuing a mouse. “My girl, shall I conjure up the Hag’s face for you? Is that why you’ve such a touching devotion to my dear old home?”

Instinctively, both Mrs. Macrae and I glanced up at the staircase, but the clouded sun in the wide Yorkshire sky outside the front door was now overhead and no longer cast those suggestive beams into the cobwebs. I was tremendously relieved to see nothing more horrifying than the dusty staircase. I could observe Jassy Macrae’s similar relief, but I had not the least notion why she should resent my possible purchase of the Hag’s Head.

I offered to help Patrick remove Macrae’s body to the gig, and we managed it between us, with the strangely reluctant assistance of Mrs. Macrae, who located a
moth-eaten
blanket left by some trespassers in the common room at a time past and wrapped the body with it. The mare kicked up and nearly overturned the gig, but Jassy and I soothed her down, and by the time Patrick had settled the wrapped body securely in the gig, the mare was subdued, if not enthusiastic.

It was not the mare but Jassy with whom we had the most difficulty. Patrick said, “Take the reins, Jassy. There’ll barely be room for you and—” He broke off, adding with a glance at me, “Kate and I will cut cross the moor by a footpath.”

“Now, that you will not!” cried Jassy. “You take the gig and young Miss and Macrae. It’s me that walks.”

I could not understand this disgusting anxiety to avoid her responsibilit
i
es, nor could I understand a certain watchful waiting on the part of Patrick Kelleher. For some strange reason he was deliberately taunting Jassy.

“Get in!” he said, his voice softer, frighteningly sweet. It gave me chills and brought Timothy scuttling out from under the wheels of the gig. I called to the little cat so sharply that he heeled to attention, and I picked him up around his middle so that he dangled limply over both sides of my hand. I watched Jassy Macrae climb up into the gig with an assisting boost from Patrick. She looked down at us before giving the mare a tug on the reins.

“I know why Macrae was in the Hag’s Head,” she said with tightly leashed anger.

“And I know,” Patrick repeated, ever so sweetly. “Go along.”

She rode off. Until the gig and the mare were at the foot of the incline we could hear the rattle of wheels. Then there was no sound but the purring of T
immy
close to me and, further off, the stiff, moaning wind as it swept across the great open heath.

Meanwhile, I glanced around the interior of the inn, feeling that someone ought to straighten things around. Also, no matter how wracking the thought
was to the nerves, someone, not to say myself, should walk calmly through every room of the inn, throwing wide the shutters and opening all windows, and thus forever stopping these wicked, anti-Christian apparitions of ghosts and old crones’ faces. Perhaps my intent showed upon my face. I already suspected that Patrick did not look with delight upon the prospect of my purchasing the Hag’s Head, and I was beginning to wonder what secrets the old place harbored that made so many persons violently antagonistic when the matter of its purchase arose. Nothing less than a cache of rubies warranted such strong feelings!

“Kate, lass, you are beginning to have a buyer’s eye to all the details of my onetime home,” Patrick observed teasingly, but I had a feeling that he was more serious than he sounded. “You know, of course, that it was impossible to heat, and one could not walk without the crack and the creak of every accursed board in the house.”

“I thought the floors were of York stone,” I reminded him with a pleasant little smile, but my mind was working furiously on this odd effort of his to talk me out of any plan to purchase. Since I had never seriously contemplated a purchase, this seemed doubly amusing and also, in an odd, contradictory way, made me slightly more interested in owning the old place.

“Ah, well, of course.” He shrugged. “If you
will
defy the Hag, my lass, that’
ll
be your concern.” He looked out at the sky, while I saw suddenly
the drying stain on the taproom floor, an odd color, not like blood at all, but rusty and pale. Poor Macrae! Did no one shed a tear for the fellow? From the brief contact I had had with him, I thought him a rather likeable man—a drinker, true, but one expected such moorland men to drink. Theirs was not an easy, sedentary life.

“Now, I wonder what your interest might be,” Patrick pursued the matter, with that same odd persistence. “Can it be that you intend to settle yourself to live in this forsaken old wreck?”

“Quite!” I said, more pleasantly than before. I think, perhaps, he guessed that I was being heavily ironic, and it did not become me. Even I recognized that. “Shall we be on our way?” I asked, more like myself.

“Kate,” Patrick began, and I knew, or strongly guessed, what was to follow. “It appears that there are things I’ll be needing in this old wreckage and few occasions to do so. If I direct you, will you be able to make your way to Maidenmoor? You’re such a clever puss, you can do anything you set that busy little mind of yours to.”

“No need for your honeyed Irish tongue,” I said briskly. “When I do purchase this house, I’ll seal it off and put about no-trespass notices, and heaven help the man or woman who ventures upon my property then.”

I started out the door and, not at all to my surprise, was rather hastily followed by Patrick Kelleher, who ventured in that wheedling way which must have served him well in his lifetime, “Katie me
d
arlin’, don’t be cross now. If I can but get past the old dragon this night, I’ll be driving you to Heatherton Fair. Won’t that be worth the wait?” He patted me upon the back of the hand, and I am happy to say Timothy hissed at him.

Before stalking off, I stopped long enough to say, “During your rather—if I may say so—
long
life, has someone told you,
my dear sir, that your company is preferred to your absence?” He brightened under this until I added, “If so, I suggest you devote your evening to that person; for I feel quite the reverse!”

“No, now
...” he
started to say, but I walked free of his pursuing fingers and started across the garden in the rising wind to the gate, which had finally broken away from the low stone wall when we were bringing out Macrae’s body.

“Will you not be asking the way, then, pretty Kate?”

I felt a powerful inclination to reply, “Not in the least, pretty Pat,” but restrained myself from what I can only say was an almost overwhelming temptation.

He must have felt a certain moral responsibility for my safety, however, for he hurried out after me, trampling over the blackened heather and pointing out with some urgency, “Remember, Kathleen, you take the straight of it, not the crosstrail, or you’ll end up at the Hag’s Head again.”

“And we mustn’t have that, must we?” I asked sweetly, and hurried away from the grim but oddly fascinating old building and the less grim, less fascinating, and slightly less ancient Patrick Kelleher.

The wind swept across the moors, twisting and curling up from among the moist, velvety hollows and pushing everything before its fury. I was glad I had dressed for chill weather, for it was quite cold despite the frosty northern sun, which appeared and disappeared among the tumbled clouds. In the distance to the north I made out a bundled sheepman and his flock, separated from me by innumerable waves of hill and dale, little black borders of woodland, a tangled spinney or two, and always the grandeur of solitude.

How many sheep trails there were crossing my path! Even Timothy, going before me in short, odd cat-leaps, was confused. As for me, I had not realized before how deceiving the sheep trails could be, even when the sky was piercing and blue and windswept, as now. I had been so disgusted with the Irishman, so anxious to be away from his annoying wiles, that I had not quite concentrated upon his directions. However, I did remember that I was to take “the straight of it,” rather than one of these cross-trails. Not a very difficult thing to remember at first, while I was still in sight of the Hag’s Head and had but to turn and study the path behind me to get my bearings.

But by the time the inn was hidden behind more and greater slopes of mauve and dun color, the wind had raised to a furious roar, sweeping furze bushes, blackened heather, and loose dirt across the heath before it. Timothy disappeared ahead of me, and I followed him down into a little thicket of entangled trees and bushes through which meandered a stream, or “beck,” as the local inhabitants called it. The banks of the stream were emerald-green with moss, but as I started across this carpet my feet sank down into the soggy morass, curiously red in color. I had never seen mud quite that color. I decided to follow the stream until there was less boggy red mud to get across.

I
t was dark in here among the bushy trees, which had many times before trapped all the flying debris from the moorland storms. I was so carefully avoiding the boggy patches that I paid the price of my single-minded concentration by snapping a twig in two and lodging the pointed end inside my shoe.
I put out one hand for balance against the trunk of a sapling and raised my foot, emptying out my shoe and tapping it against the little tree.

Timothy thought I was playing some sort of game with him and leaped up to paw at my shoe, dropping back afterward with light, boneless ease, only to stop as he raised his paw again. Suddenly he dropped to all fours and crouched there with his ears pointed stiffly upward as if he were listening. His sensitivity suddenly made me aware of the thick, dusky look of the little copse around us.
The moorland wind high above our heads, snapping at the top foliage and roaring on to produce
havoc elsewhere, made it impossible for me to hear betraying sounds of other life than Timmy and me in the little copse, I could trust the acute senses of the little cat.

I still had my shoe off, and with the sudden realization that some person or animal was near us, unknown and unseen, I limped around in a panic, trying to get my shoe on. At the same time I looked before me along the tangled way I had come since reaching the beck and tried vainly to see a bit more behind me and on either side. At my left side was the soggy moss, and beyond was the water making way through the reeds and rushes and tumbled rocks. Dimly, I could see through the bushes on the opposite bank, and I made out nothing more dangerous than a furry little brown rodent of the moors, drinking at the beck, but with a watchful eye and ear out for Timothy, who at the moment had no interest in him.

I was fairly sure there could be no danger in whatever had disturbed the little cat. The most savage creatures in this area were the watchdogs owned by the farmers and small-property owners of the countryside, and any hound on our trail would have leaped long ago, either at Timothy or me. I watched Tim carefully to see which direction disturbed him and saw on the slope above us a vague, indistinguishable creature half-hidden by the fiercely blowing bushes. It was probably a great mastiff that had been following upon our trail and hovered over us where the ground dipped
sharply down toward the beck. The beast had chosen a perfect place for an ambush. It had but to leap down upon us.

I snatched up Timmy, along with my shoe, and stepped hastily across the wet, mossy bank, feeling the mud ooze about my stockinged foot as I leaped the last hurdle into the stream. I heard my own cry of pain as my unprotected foot twisted upon the sharp stones of the stream bed, but I had a healthy fear of the dogs hereabouts, whose vicious protection of their masters’ property was a matter of legend, and I could not stop to pamper myself.

Once I reached the opposite bank, I scrambled up, squeezing the cat until I was surprised he did no more than meow plaintively. It was obvious that, like me, he was too frightened to feel pain. Just as I paused a minute to discover the quickest way through the wind-blown thicket at the top of the bank, Timmy gave a loud, open-mouthed snarl, and I glanced back across the stream, expecting to hear the furious answering growl of our pursuer. Instead, I saw once more a peculiar, indistinct presence hovering in the darkest wooded part of the thicket, near where I had first stopped on the other side of the stream to remove my shoe. A most peculiar dog, if dog it was, not to have leaped after Timothy or barked at the very least. For one dreadful moment, doubting my own sanity, I fancied that the pallid mask of an old crone gazed up at me from the heart of that thicket. It was too fantastic. In the next instant I knew that my encounter at the inn today had obsessed my thoughts.

It was enough for me. I slipped my shoe on and scrambled through the bushes, which scratched and clung to Timothy’s fur and my coat. Then I began to run, finding that my ankle pained me hideously and hindered, but by no means stopped, my flying feet.

I had not forgotten Patrick’s warning to me to take the trail straight on rather than any of the sheep paths that crossed it. I saw no sign of crossing trails and felt that by great good luck I had come out of that thicket exactly into the path I sought. I ran on, hoping to gain ground and perhaps cross another low-lying beck before the beast tracking us made his decision to cross the first stream. Our scent might be destroyed by that stream. I hoped so.

I began to limp more and more painfully, and suddenly I stumbled over a rock in the path, like any ignorant London outlander. I went down on one knee, barely catching Timmy before he slipped out of my arms, and fell upon him. I got up, gritting my teeth against the intermittent, stabbing pain through my left foot, which I had wrenched in crossing the stream. I felt it quite beyond my power to run any further, but I managed to limp along, concentrating upon one step at a time.