Rose Cottage (13 page)

‘I tried to,’ she said simply. ‘I did say something, and I tried to hurry, but I tripped over a kerbstone and dropped my flowers, and when I got up they were gone.’

‘“They”? You said “they”. Who was with her?’

‘I couldn’t see him very well, and of course I never knew him, but he was tall and dark, like the gipsy, the one at the caravan.’

‘And when you tried to speak or approach them, they disappeared? Just vanished?’

She nodded, but as if answering a question I had not asked. ‘Yes, I know, my dear. You’re kind, and you have good manners, and you listen, but you still don’t believe. Well, I don’t understand it any more than you do, and perhaps I was mistaken, but I had to tell you. I do believe that I saw them there, both together, on Sunday, by the grave.’

‘By your brother’s grave?’ I said, blankly.

‘Oh, no! What would they be doing there? It was your Aunt Betsy’s.’

She went soon after that, refusing my offer to see her as far as the road. She had never been afraid of the dark, she told me, with something of a return to her earlier manner; night was more interesting than day. On this note she floated off, a shapeless ghost muffled in cloak and scarf, to vanish into the shadows of the lane.

Interesting indeed. I retreated rather smartly into the comforting firelight of the cottage kitchen, trying to think sensibly and coolly about what she had told me. It could not be true. It obviously could not be true. But, perhaps illogically, the very fact that her vision of the young Lilias’s flight into the lonnen was apparently so accurate, bade one believe that her tale of the couple in
the cemetery might be true, even if her interpretation of it was not.

I added the album to the goods laid ready for packing, then rummaged in the drawer for an envelope, ready for the list of dates for the vicar that would go up with the milk in the morning. As I folded the notes and sealed the envelope my mind raced away again, putting together the odd things that had happened. The light in the cottage garden. The empty safe – robbed by someone who had a key. The digging by the toolshed. And now this weird and unlikely story of Lilias and her gipsy at Aunt Betsy’s graveside …

Comfortingly, none of it added up to anything believable. Lilias back from the dead, and not getting in touch with Gran or myself? Not going near anyone in the village? Coming back from a long silence of some sixteen years, during which time neither her mother nor her daughter had had a word from her? Coming back, apparently, simply to visit the grave of the woman she had, with reason, hated, and then vanishing like a ghost at Miss Linsey’s approach?

I got briskly to my feet, propped the envelope behind the empty milk bottle in the porch, along with a biscuit for Rosy, then I raked out the remains of the fire, and locked both doors before going up to bed. I didn’t want any more of Miss Linsey’s interesting things to happen while I was alone at Rose Cottage.

I was wakened next morning by the sound of Rosy’s hoofs in the lane. I had not found it easy to get to sleep. The night had been quite silent and uneventful, but I kept thinking about Miss Linsey’s ghosts. If Miss Mildred’s story of the light at the cottage, and the digging, was true – as seemed to be proved by the disturbed patch near the toolshed and the state of the coal shovel – then it was possible, just possible, that Miss Linsey’s story of the couple with the light at the site of the old caravan might have some truth in it as well. As for her ‘seeing’ of the young Lilias running up the lonnen with a bag in either hand, that was a story known by this time to everyone in the village, and she had admitted it to be merely a dream, but I was well aware that she had not been called a witch for nothing. I could think of at least two occasions when her prophetic ‘dream’ of a disaster had been right, and on one of those occasions a life had been saved. So it might at least be worth looking into.

But her story of the couple encountered in the cemetery was harder to explain. Her Sunday evening visit to her brother’s grave must have been real enough, but the encounter with the ghostly couple was surely a trick of the imagination, suggested, perhaps, by the other dream? For Miss Linsey to recognise Lilias, a Lilias last seen almost twenty years ago, and now glimpsed at some distance in the evening dusk, and then to have her and her gipsy companion vanish when approached – it had to be a dream, and dreams, as all Todhall knew, were Miss Linsey’s stock-in-trade.

But what had so disturbed me about it was the fact that she had not enjoyed telling me. Had been, if not frightened, then deeply uneasy. So could there be some sort of ‘message’ here for me? Some sort of ghostly getting-in-touch, like those prophecies of hers that the village still remembered with respect?

Which was nonsense, I told myself. And maybe I had missed a chance to solve my own mystery. With Miss Linsey in soothsaying mood, I should have asked her where Gran’s treasures had vanished to …

On which robust note I turned over and went to sleep, and woke to the sound of the milk cart and the creak of the garden gate.

I flung back the bedclothes and ran to the open casement.

‘Good morning, Mr Blaney! I’m sorry, I slept in. Just a pint, please, and I wonder if you’d be good enough to leave that envelope at the vicarage? The vicar’s expecting it.’

‘That’s all right. No bother at all. Lovely day, isn’t it? You staying on till the weekend? Well, don’t you trouble yourself, you just get your sleep, and I’ll leave you one tomorrow, and it’ll be two on Saturday. We don’t do a round on a Sunday.’

I noticed the ‘we’. Sunday wouldn’t be his day off, farmers didn’t have them. It was Rosy’s. I had forgotten that. I smiled. ‘Yes, thank you. It looks as if I’m to be here at least till Monday. And that’s Rosy’s biscuit under the envelope.’

He took it, pocketed the envelope, waved the empty bottle in salute, and went off.

Somehow his simple kindness made the worries of the night seem trivial. Cheered and soothed, I dressed and had breakfast and then, after finishing the morning’s chores, went out to gather flowers for Granddad’s grave. That I chose to visit the cemetery this morning was, I told myself, nothing to do with Miss Linsey’s story. I had intended to go one day while I was here, to take flowers on Gran’s behalf and for myself, and to check, as she had asked me to, that the sexton was earning the small fee he got for keeping the grave-plot tidy.

That was all. Nothing to do with ghosts, or a witch’s dreams.

I didn’t bother to find an excuse for what I did after I had gathered the flowers and packed them carefully with some damp moss into a basket. The cemetery lay at the south end of the village, and the shortest way would of course have been by the lane. The other route was by the lonnen, which reached the main
road a good quarter of a mile beyond the cemetery wall.

I went by the lonnen.

There was a stronger breeze today, and the birds were still busy with their morning songs. Deep in the lane the air was still, full of the scents of fern and dead leaves and wild garlic and the musk of Herb Robert trodden underfoot. High overhead the treetops rustled and soughed, but where I walked it was like being at the bottom of a deep, still stream. The only movement was the sudden whisk of russet-brown as a squirrel scudded up a tree trunk, and the flight of a blackbird cutting low across the path with a beakful of food for its young.

The remains of the caravan were still there, some little way above the gap where I had entered the lonnen on my way from the station. Elder and brambles were growing round and into it, and everywhere there were nettles, those jackal plants that follow humans and take over their deserted homes.

One wheel lay flat, barely visible in long grass. The other was still held, at a crazy slant, by a rusted bolt. The wood of both was almost rotted away, held only by the decaying iron rims. The van itself was a rotten shell, its roof fallen in and its sides sagging. The shafts, the whole front rig, had come adrift and was in pieces on the ground.

It was a long-forgotten wreck which could not possibly have anything to tell me. Nevertheless I set my basket down and prodded about among the crumbling
wood and the undergrowth, picking up a few nettle-stings and a scratch or two from the brambles, but no message from the past. Nothing left by the ghosts of Miss Linsey’s vision. Just a host of memories, my own ghosts, remembered with amusement and a kind of sadness, the ghosts of the children who had played in this lane, and for whom this derelict gipsy van had been at once romantic and terrifying, and a goal of challenge and delight.

A sound brought me round, my heart suddenly thudding, as if the place had not wholly lost its terror. A sound which in any other place would hardly even have made me turn my head. A breaking twig, and the slither of a footstep on the bank above me.

The sun, blazing through a gap at the top of the bank, was blinding me. Against it, at the head of the bank, stood a man, gigantic against the distorting brilliance, body bent forward to stare down at me. He grabbed a branch, swung himself through the gap, and came down the bank at a run, and it was only Davey Pascoe, in his working overalls, and not looking in the least like the menacing gipsy giant that my nerves had conjured up. In fact, so wrapped had I been in my memories that it came as a kind of shock to see him there, a young man with the same thatch of light brown hair and the same grey eyes as the child whose ghost, a moment before, had been playing there.

I let my breath out. ‘Damn you, Davey! You frightened me!’

‘Did I? Well, you disappointed me. I heard something moving about down here, and I thought it might
be a badger. There’s a sett further up, and they do sometimes come out in daylight.’

‘Really. Well, I’m sorry. But what were you doing here anyway?’

‘I’ve been at Swords. The job’s finished, so I thought I’d come back this way and see how you were getting on. I’m not working this afternoon, and I thought you might be starting to sort the stuff out for packing.’

‘Well, thanks, but I haven’t done much yet.’ I indicated the basket of flowers. ‘I was going to the cemetery with those.’

‘Why this way? It’s quicker by the lane.’ He grinned, and it was the grin I remembered. ‘Or did someone dare you?’

‘Who’d do that? I never took the dare anyway. No, I came because I wanted to see—’ I stopped. I was not sure myself just what I had wanted to see.

‘See what?’

‘I don’t know. It sounds silly. The van, I suppose. I’ve wondered, sometimes, if there’s any way you could tell where it was made or who owned it. You know, like a number plate on a car.’

‘After all this time? Even if there was, it’s gone long since.’ He was frowning now. ‘Look, Kathy, it’s past history. You’ll do yourself no good by trying to rake it all up again now. Can’t you let yourself see that it’s past?’ He finished it deliberately. ‘Past and dead and gone.’

The three syllables fell like stones. I turned and picked up the basket.

‘Yes. I know. I’ve accepted that long ago. I’ve had to.
Don’t worry about me, Davey. I don’t want to rake anything up that’s better left alone. But we’ve got this mystery on our hands, Gran’s things being stolen, and I thought – well, something happened last night that set me wondering, and I came along here to check it out.’

‘Last night?’ he said sharply. ‘What happened? Has anyone been bothering you at the cottage?’

‘No, no. Nothing like that. It was Miss Linsey. She came to see me, and told me some very queer things.’

He laughed. ‘Old Linsey-woolsey? I’ll bet. Such as?’

‘Oh, it’s a long story, and it’ll sound queerer still in daylight.’

‘Well, queer or not, I’ll listen. Here, give me that basket. I’ll go back with you, and you can tell me about it.’

His bicycle was at the head of the bank, propped against a stump. He slung the basket over the handle bars and, as we walked up through the field towards the road, with Davey wheeling the bicycle, I told him about Miss Linsey’s visit.

His reaction was, I suppose, predictable.

‘Silly old bat, saying she didn’t want to scare you, and then doing her best to give you nightmares! Well, you can forget all that about your mum running up the lonnen. I could’ve said all that to you myself, there’s no one in the village that hadn’t heard all about her taking off like that, and, I might say,’ he added, ‘there’s no one who blames her, running away from that old catamaran – well, speak no ill, and there’s two sides to everything. But this tale of old Linsey-woolsey’s about the
couple at the graveside – that might be interesting, seeing what else has happened. I mean, there’s been someone at the cottage, that’s for sure, and it might just be that – Oh, well, leave it for now. Here we are, and we can go in by the side gate. Your Granda’s near it, you’ll remember, a little way along.’

There was a door set into the high brick wall of the cemetery. Davey leaned the bicycle there, retrieved my basket for me, and pushed open the door.