Mist Over Pendle (41 page)

Grace turned back to the petticoat and carefully completed its folding.

“It isn’t,” she said quietly, as she began to press a collar, “It isn’t at all.”

“Grace! What do you mean?”

“No more than that.” Grace had her eyes on the point of the iron. “He’s still at Lathom--or so I must suppose. I’ve no word.”

“No letter even? Does he send nothing?”

“How should he? Who rides here from Lathom?”

Grace turned to the hearth and exchanged her iron for another. Margery tried to sound cheerful.

“That’s true,” she said. “He’d hardly get a letter carried. So perhaps he languishes for you. Absence, they say---”

“They don’t say it when there’s a mother like that.”

Grace sounded vicious as she took another collar from the pile, and Margery abandoned the attempt to be cheerful. She agreed only too thoroughly with Grace.

“You think---”

“Don’t you?” Grace cut in at once. “I’ve told you before what Alice Nutter thinks of me. And now she’s got him away, and that will be the end of it.”

“Hardly the end, Grace. She can’t keep him away for ever.”

“No. But when he’s back she’ll have some other slyness ripe. She’s as crafty as a Jesuit, and as hard as the millstones yonder. I tell you Margery, I know Alice Nutter, even if you don’t.”

But Margery thought she did know Alice Nutter, perhaps even better than Grace did--and nothing in her knowledge offered any comfort. There was, she thought as she rode home, very little comfort for anybody. Grace was plainly miserable, and Miles was hardly likely to be happy. Roger might expect trouble at any time, and Richard Baldwin might both provoke it and suffer its consequences. And she herself felt some impact from all their troubles. The only person who seemed to have any cause for satisfaction was Alice Nutter.

She had a brush with Alice the next Sunday as they came out of Whalley church. Roger had been kept in talk by a neighbour, and as Margery waited in the churchyard, Alice Nutter, very elegant and very self-assured, rounded on her.

“You seem deserted, mistress,” was her greeting, and Margery’s eyes were not friendly as she roused herself for what might follow.

“For the moment only,” she answered, with a quick glance at Roger.

Alice nodded affably.

“And how is Master Hilliard?” she inquired, and thus showed her true meaning. “Have we seen the last of him here?”

“Who knows, madam?” Margery saw no reason to act as informant to Alice Nutter.

“He was no doubt wise to leave. This Pendle climate can be dangerous.”

Margery gasped. This was almost brazen, and there was a gleam of triumph in the dark eyes. Margery set herself to quench

“Indeed, madam, I have heard of some who died most oddly in this Pendle.”

And Margery nodded in her turn. She was holding firm to her belief that Alice Nutter was best dealt with by prompt counterattack.

The gleam of triumph faded and something ugly took its place.

“They died oddly, did they? And they were folk bred in Pendle?” There was a hint of menace in the smooth voice now. “There might be greater hazard for another.”

“Another?”

The nod came again.

“Master Hilliard is wise to flee our climate. He was not bred to it.” The dark eyes gleamed again. “Nor were you, mistress.”

“Nor you, madam, as I’m told. But perhaps you were fortunate?”

“How, if you please?”

“You were bred, no doubt, in an equally treacherous climate.”

The dark eyes quivered, and Margery watched with satisfaction. That thrust had gone home, and already she was preparing another.

“How is Master Miles?” she asked innocently. “I’m told he’s away.”

“At Lathom, mistress. He’s been there these three weeks.” “You are no doubt prudent, madam. He’ll be away from harm there.”

“There’s no prudence in it.” The smooth voice was rougher now. “He’s there by invitation.”

The gleam was in Margery’s eyes now, and her voice slowed to a drawl that was almost insolent.

“Invitation? Ah, yes. Of one Potter, I’m told.”

Alice Nutter’s face twitched. Plainly she was not used to this sort of thing, and she was too angry to see the trap.

“Of Master Matthew Potter, if you please. And pray remember that Master Potter is my nephew.”

“Nephew, is it?”

Margery’s eyebrows lifted just sufficiently to point her meaning, and Alice Nutter’s temper broke. The dark eyes blazed, and a wave of red flushed her pale cheeks; and before she had recovered her poise Margery had made a curtsey that was insolent in its fullness, and was marching down the path with Roger, who had been standing, she discovered, comfortably within earshot.

“That’s barbed by-play,” he remarked as they rode away. “How did it begin?”

“Begin?” Margery was less calm now than she had been. “It began with Alice Nutter coming wantonly from her way, to play cat-and-mouse with me.”

“Cat-and-mouse?” Roger laughed. “A pretty mouse you are! You’ve claws as sharp as hers, and your aim’s better. But she’ll remember it, and I’d advise you to have a care when she comes again.”

But Alice Nutter did not come again, and in the days that followed Margery neither saw her nor heard of her. And the days grew tedious. Nothing seemed to Margery to go as she had hoped it would. Harry Hargreaves, industriously seeking for any pointer that might show who had desecrated the graves, had to report complete failure; and Jennet Device, on whom Margery had pinned some hopes, was just as useless. She came regularly, and she chattered freely; but all she could say about Candlemas was that her own folk had not been out that night. Then Margery found another source of anxiety. She went frequently to Goldshaw, to chat with Tony Nutter and do what she could to cheer him as he regained strength; and going there one cold and windy morning she was distressed to find that he was no longer in his elbow-chair by the fire. Sister Margaret explained gloomily that Tony was back in bed. He had made such progress, she said, and had regained such spirits, that he had insisted on going out. The wind had been cold and the result disastrous, as his sister had feared it would be. These lung troubles, she said, were noted for their trick of coming back, and Tony should have had more sense. But there it was! Tony had never had any sense, and there
he
was --back in bed again. Margaret chatted lightly about it, but she could not wholly conceal her anxiety, and Margery went away depressed and anxious too.

Her spirits were not much raised by a letter which Frank contrived to send to her. He wrote cheerfully, and he said that all went well at home; but he had to add that his mother had been more disordered than he had supposed, and her recovery was taking longer--and in short, he would not be able to begin his journey back to Pendle until the end of the month at soonest. Margery pulled a wry face at that. The letter was of cheerful tone, and it had some pleasing sentiments, but the fact remained that Frank had not yet started. Margery went to Roger and plied him with questions about probable travelling-times on winter roads, and her calculation after that was that a return in the first or second week of March was the best she could hope for; and that, in her present humours, seemed a whole weary age away.

But she had to make the best of it, and as February went its windy way she filled in her time with whatever she could. She was at least always welcome at Wheathead, and she was able to give Grace the news, which young Jennet had somehow gleaned from nowhere, that Miles Nutter was expected to be back at the Rough Lee before Lent began. That was how Jennet had put it, and as Ash Wednesday would be the fourth of March, Grace had something to look forward to; Miles might surely be expected to contrive something when he was once back in Pendle.

But Lent brought news of a different sort to Margery. On Ash Wednesday she learned that Tony Nutter was perceptibly weaker; on the Friday he was worse, and on the Saturday his sister was in unconcealed anxiety. And on the Sunday, a grey and windless day of teeming rain, Jennet Device made a surprise appearance when Margery was just into her orange-tawny in readiness for Whalley church. Tony Nutter, said Jennet cheerfully, was a-dying; he might last the day or he might not, but certainly he was a-dying.

Margery sent the rain-soaked child to the kitchen to be dried and fed, and she herself went in blank dismay to Roger. She found him coming down the stair, cloaked and booted for church, and she told him with no waste of words; and could they not, she asked, ride to Goldshaw instead of Whalley?

Slowly Roger shook his head.

“That might give embarrassment,” he said.

“Embarrassment? But surely---”

“I’ll be better at Whalley.” He did not explain that, but he eyed her strangely. “But
you
may go to Goldshaw. And when you’re there, and have seen the shape of things, you may give such messages from me as you then judge proper.”

At another time that might have set Margery probing for his meaning, but at this moment she was too concerned for Tony. She thanked Roger hastily, took one look at the weather, and spared five minutes to change the orange-tawny for her russets and then she was away.

The Forest lay dark under the pattering rain. It streamed steadily from the low unbroken cloud; it dripped from the trees and ran in rivulets among the grass, its lazy drip and patter loud in the windless air. The track was a squelching sponge, and Margery had to keep her stumbling horse to a slow and cautious walk. She took twice her usual time for the familiar journey, and when at last she came to the house in the pines, her hat and cloak were black, her face was scoured with rain, and a cold trickle from her sodden collar was running down her neck.

The pines were stark in the grey mist, and behind them the house was quiet and still. Margery sat motionless on her weary horse, and a vague dread began to work on her. There was something odd here, something unnatural and therefore ominous; this silent house offered her no welcome; it stood aloof in the trees and the dripping rain, and it ignored her. The door stayed bleak and shut, and the old servitor did not come out to take her horse. And then she saw that at the window above the door, which she knew to be that of Tony’s bedchamber, the curtains had been drawn across.

Her alarm grew; she slipped from her horse and made for the door, her boots sliding wetly in the gravel. Some impulse kept her from knocking. Instead she pushed open the door and stepped quietly in.

The low square hall was still and empty; but not perhaps deserted, for at the foot of the stair a candle burned, the tallow guttering untidily. The kitchen door stood open, and revealed nothing of any serving girls. But from above, from somewhere past the bend of the stair, a voice could be heard, faint and indistinct.

Margery stood stiffly, and was tense and disturbed. Then she moved slowly to the stair, and the hush that was on the house persuaded her to go tip-toe. She crept silently up the treads till she could see past the bend to the door she knew to be his bedchamber; and here she stopped abruptly. The door was shut, but it fitted badly, and in the chink was candle-light; and unendingly, unceasingly, the quiet voice ran on.

The voice stopped, and there were sounds of hushed movement; then a clink, and the voice spoke again; but this time it spoke slowly, and the words were clear.
Hoc est enim Corpus Meum. . . .
She heard the low mutter of the Latin, and she pressed back, startled, against the wainscot, as her puritan upbringing reared in her mind, hinting vaguely at subtle dangers. But at least there could be no doubt of what this meant. A muttered Mass in a curtained room could mean one thing only: Tony Nutter was
in extremis.

But in her alarm she had moved too quickly. Her wet boot slipped on the smooth boards, and her spurred heel clattered against the wainscot. She stood rigid, half frightened and half irritated, wondering what it would bring. Then, when she was beginning to hope she had not been heard, the door was slowly opened, and Margaret Crook, her face white and anxious, peered out. There was relief in her strained eyes as she saw who it was, and Margery did her best to be reassuring; she contrived a smile, and she touched pursed lips with a finger as a sign that she would keep the secret. Apparently Margaret understood, for she went quickly back into the room, and the door shut softly behind her.

Margery tip-toed down the stair, and after pulling off her gloves, untying her cloak and easing her hat from her wet hair, she went across the hall into the parlour beyond. She mended the fire and laid her wet things before it, and then she moved to the window and stood staring blankly through the glass--staring till the dark clouds faded from her view, and time went back, and it was again a bright September morning with the soft wind blowing through the open lattice; and Tony Nutter was standing in the sunlight, giving her easy talk and a first friendly welcome.

Feet shuffled on the stair, and again the sky was dark with the clouds and the drenching rain. She turned wearily as the old servant came in, and in silence she pointed to her wet and shivering horse, still patient in the rain. The old man nodded, and in a few moments she saw him go out and lead the beast to the stable behind the house. Again there were feet on the stair, a sharp precise tread this time; and Margery turned sharply as Christopher Southworth came into the room.

They looked at each other in silence, and it was Margery who spoke first.

“We owe you thanks,” she said, “for a book. And I for a Cross.”

It was trivial at this moment, and she knew it, but she could think of nothing better. He inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“I owe you thanks for more than that,” he said. “And twice. I would that you were of the true Faith.”

“You waste your time at that.”

“And time does not belong to me,” he answered quietly. “It is lent to me only, and for a purpose. And perhaps the loan is running out. “What do you intend?”

“Nothing. You know well enough that I shall not betray you.”

He bowed slightly.

“My debt increases. Then I’ll be upon my way. But first, Mistress Crook would be--would be private with me.”