The Cure of Souls (48 page)

… And yet it was wrong.

It was sickeningly, shatteringly wrong.

It grew cold. The air around them grew as cold as the moonlight. Lol heard wooden poles creaking, as if one had cracked. They were old poles, some had fallen, many were probably rotting inside their creosote shells. Held inert by a damp dread, he heard a crumbly rustling that his mind translated into images of brittle hop-cones on mummified bines. He heard the humming in the wires and looked up at stringy clouds in the luminous green-grey northern sky, through the hop-frame, a black gallows.

‘
No!
’ he heard behind the studio silence, the crisp eggbox acoustic. ‘
Come out!
’

Merrily’s back felt cold against his hand, the cold of an effigy on a tomb. Their faces were apart, a chill miasma around them, as if they’d dropped into a vault, and Lol felt sick with the wrongness of it and sick at heart with what this implied.

C
LOSE TO MIDNIGHT
. Sweet, black tea. A cardigan around her shoulders. A warm summer’s night, and she was still cold under a moon that now looked pocked and diseased.

The iron table was wobbling between clumps of couch grass on the cracked flagged yard in front of Prof Levin’s studio, the four of them seated around it, Merrily between Al and Sally Boswell, with her back to the hay meadow and the moon.

‘I called you,’ Sally was telling her. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I stood in the clearing and I shouted to you to come out of there. My voice’ – she looked at her husband in sorrow and some irritation – ‘doesn’t have the carrying power any more.’

‘She means I should have gone in for you, but she thinks I was afraid.’ Al was sitting with his back to the stable wall. ‘I wouldn’t go further than the little wood.’ He put a hand over Merrily’s. ‘Well, maybe. But the real truth is, I’d only’ve made it worse. My father was the
chovihano
. I just make guitars.’

Sally said, ‘After you’d gone, we talked about it and then we came after you. With Stock dead, there seemed to be no reason at all any more why we shouldn’t tell you… everything, I suppose.’

Opposite Merrily, with his chair pulled a little further back from the table than the others, Lol was looking down at his hands on his lap. Merrily felt his confusion. Also the distress, coming off him in waves.

Al was talking to her. ‘… like we were saying earlier about the Romany custom of burning the
vardo
? Was this your Christian way of ensuring that the Stocks did not—?’

‘Maybe.’ It seemed such a long time ago. Had she actually done that? Had she completed her impromptu apology for a Deliverance? Had she even started it?

Couldn’t remember.

Couldn’t
remember
.

‘Brave girl,’ Al was saying, ‘but maybe not so wise. That yard – the yard in the shadow of the last kiln – they tried to turn it into pasture once, and the cattle kept aborting.’

Why couldn’t she remember? Was it the potion Sally had given her? She said, ‘Can someone tell me what happened? Did something happen in there?’

Lol looked up, bewilderment in his eyes.

‘We couldn’t see what was happening,’ Sally said quickly. ‘Too many poles.’

‘Laurence brought you out,’ Al said. ‘I respect him for that.’

She didn’t understand.

Lol said to Sally, ‘Why don’t you tell us about the Lady of the Bines? That’s what this all comes back to, isn’t it? Rebekah Smith.’

Sally shot him a glance. ‘The Lady of the Bines… there’s been more than one, of course.’

Lol nodded.

‘But the original, I suppose,’ Sally said, ‘was Conrad’s first wife. Caroline.’

It was the local secretary of the National Farmers’ Union who had got into conversation with Sally. This was in the mid-seventies, when Verticillium Wilt first hit Herefordshire in a big way. They wanted to discourage young trespassers who might carry the disease from yard to yard, and Sally had said, in fun almost, why not put a ghost story round?

And she’d thought then about the Emperor of Frome and how much more resonance the story would have if it carried echoes of the truth.

According to the ‘legend’, the Knight of Knight’s Frome had banished his wife because she could not give him a son. It wasn’t quite like that with Caroline, but the basis was there. It was true that she couldn’t have children, threatening Conrad’s dynastic dreams – Conrad, collector of farms, with his lust for land, each new field turned into a sea of stakes, a medieval battleground. Eight centuries earlier, Sally said, Conrad would have impaled the heads of his competitors on hop-poles as a warning to other potential rivals.

And yet, he could be charming. Especially away from his domain, on one of his wild weekends in London or at someone else’s house party. He’d charmed Caroline, still in her teens, a city child with dreams of vast green acres and dawn walks through wildflower meadows.

Caroline had actually loved the hops – the exuberance of them, their mellow smell, much nicer than sour old beer. Caroline had loved, especially, the month of September when the Welsh came, and the Dudleys and the gypsies. She loved to talk to them – especially the Romanies who did not
want
to talk, who reeked of mystery.

Conrad had said she should not mix with them, the lower orders – lower species, he’d implied. Conrad would drive among the hop-yards in his Land Rover, a royal visitor. He looked on his pickers, it was said, much as the American cotton kings had regarded their slaves.

The fifties, this was, and the early sixties: feudal times still in the Empire of Frome.

It was said the gypsies took Caroline away,’ Lol said, explaining quickly that Isabel St John had told him a little of this – some of the dirt on Conrad Lake, which would have been published in Stewart Ash’s book.

‘And I suppose they did, in a way,’ Sally said.

Caroline became particularly close to one family after helping them get medical assistance for a child who turned out to have meningitis. Caroline called out her own doctor in the middle of
the night and the condition was diagnosed in time to save the child. This was something the Romanies would not forget and, from then on, the doors were open to the young Empress, the mysteries revealed. Under the tutelage of an old lady – the
puri dai
, the wise woman – and some others, she became aware of an entirely new way of looking at the countryside, the world.

She learned about living lightly on the land. Taking what you needed and no more and then moving on. Fires from the hedgerows, water from the springs. The secret of
not owning
.

‘Ecology… green politics… all this was far in the future.’ Sally’s face shone in the light from the stable walls, and her hair was like steam. ‘To Conrad it was simply communism, of course. Conrad lived
very
heavily on the land. For a while, she thought she could change him – women do, as you know, and sometimes they succeed. But Conrad was already middle-aged and heavy with greed, and Caroline, still in her twenties, was learning fast… too fast.’

‘They gave her a present,’ Al said. ‘The Romanies, this was. The mother of the baby she helped save made her a dress, a beautiful white dress, exquisitely embroidered. She wore this wonderful garment, with pride, to a party at the end of the hop season. This was the first and the last time she was to wear it.’

‘The Emperor went into her wardrobe and took out the dress,’ Sally said. ‘Took it into the kiln – yes, yes,
that
kiln. Gave it to the furnace-man to put into the furnace. The furnace-man couldn’t bear to do it and took it home to
his
wife, who wore it to a dance. The word got back, and the furnace-man was sacked, of course. After this, the dress was considered bad luck, but no one wanted to destroy it. It was passed from hand to hand and… well, we have it at the hop museum now. One day, I like to think, it will go on display. When it’s safe. When the full story’s told.’

‘What
did
happen to Caroline?’ Merrily asked. ‘She left him, presumably.’

‘Yes, after… I – I believe that Conrad began to abuse her in a more direct sense.’

‘Physically?’

‘Conrad was an
owner
. Body and soul. Caroline had to leave him, of course she did. She had a little money of her own, and the gypsies had awoken in her a need for
more
… within less. There was – we assume – a discreet divorce. She joined a community set up to develop human potential – at Coombe Springs with J.G. Bennett, who had been a pupil of the Armenian guru, Gurdjieff, at Fontainebleau. And she embraced Schumacher. But Caroline is not so important to our story from then on. If she ever came back, I imagine it
was
to haunt Conrad’s hop-yards.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘She’s not important,’ Sally said. ‘Rebekah Smith’s the important one now.’

The Rom were always very protective of their women. The term ‘communal existence’ didn’t come close; it was a vibrantly crowded life among siblings and parents, grandparents, great-grandparents – eating together, sleeping together, part of the same chattering organism, Al explained.

The point being that young gypsy women did
not
go for solitary walks. Outside the camp, even outside the
vardo
, they were always within sight of the brothers and the uncles. Part of the traditional defence mechanism.

So how could Rebekah disappear?

‘I’ll show you some photos of her sometime,’ Al promised. ‘You’ll see the long, coppery hair, the wide, white gash of her mouth as if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth. It gives you a small idea of what went wrong.’

No one could explain how Rebekah came to be quite as she was.
Poshrat, didekai
? No way. Her lineage was impeccable. This was a good family, and Rebekah was deeply grounded in the traditions. Also, she had the sight, had been
dukkering
from early childhood. Rebekah could read your palm and your very eyes. Rebekah could look at you and
know
. They used to say a true
chovihani
was the result of some dark union between a
Romany woman and an elemental spirit. Well, everyone knew who Rebekah’s mother’s husband was. But her father?

‘If you look carefully at the pictures, you’ll see the courage and the arrogance. She was not afraid to be out there,’ Al said. ‘She was twenty-three years old, and they all said she ought to have been married.’

When she wanted to go off, for a night or longer, she’d always outwit the brothers and the uncles, who would suffer the consequential tirades from the wizened lips of the
puri dai
every time they lost her. But lose her they would, whenever Rebekah decided it was time to make one of her forays into the
gaujo
world.

It was as if something would be awakened in her during the hop-picking season in Knight’s Frome, when the gypsies were as close as they ever came to being part of a larger community. After she went missing, the police discovered she was already well known – or at least very much noticed – in some pubs in Bromyard and Ledbury, also further afield, Hereford, Worcester. A woman of the world, it seemed: two worlds, in fact. Rebekah Smith, once away from the camp, wore fashionable clothes, was never even identified as a gypsy. Where did she get those clothes? Who bought them for her?

It was clear she wanted out, the police said. She wanted the bigger scene. She’d be in Birmingham now, or Cheltenham or London. Or even in America. Wherever she was, she’d have landed on her feet. She was twenty-three years old, said the travellers. She should have been married.

She was dead, said their
puri dai
.

But no body was ever found.

And the Emperor of Frome, still raging in private over the corruption and defection of his wife? Oh, he was never even questioned in any depth.

Al looked like he wanted to spit.

Sally Boswell said, ‘We look at the 1960s and we tend to think that was not so very long ago. The young musicians now are all
influenced by sixties music – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and people freaking out on hallucinogens, the voice of youth.’

She leaned forward under the wall-light, as if to make herself more real, her museum curator’s voice taking over. She must have been breathtakingly beautiful back then, Merrily thought.

‘But the sixties were a
long
time ago,’ Sally said.

Particularly the early sixties, when there was still an almost mystical aura around the Royal Family… when, in the countryside, this was still feudal England… when the Lakes were the squirearchy, clear descendants of the Norman marcher lords. And when their actions were not subject to examination.

Conrad Lake’s friends included MPs and would-be MPs like Oliver Perry-Jones. The Emperor dined and drank with senior councillors, magistrates, chief constables… and this was the time when the senior police would tend to be ex-army officers with medals from the Second World War, men for whom stability meant the preservation of a hierarchy – and the structure – at all costs. When the police knew their place.

‘Conrad was himself a magistrate for a time,’ Sally said. ‘He was also Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge. And the gypsies were vagrants, and their so-called culture was primitive. And they lied, of course. And they also had a grudge against Conrad. So when the police were told that Rebekah Smith had been seen getting into Conrad’s car…’

‘And they
were
told,’ Al said. ‘There was more than one witness.’

‘Uncles or brothers?’ Lol asked.

Al smiled. ‘You see the problem.’

Merrily saw how intense Lol had become, as though he’d channelled his confusion and distress into an urgent need to know.

‘Isabel told me the police finally concluded the gypsies had simply made it up to get back at Lake for banning them from his hop-yards,’ he said.

Sally nodded. ‘That was one suggestion, yes.’

‘But she also thought Stewart Ash had evidence linking Lake to the disappearance. Does that mean he just spoke to the gypsy witnesses who the police chose to disregard?’

‘Oh, more than that,’ said Al. ‘It would have to be more than that.’