The Smile of a Ghost (34 page)

They’d followed the rising stone wall to the walkway below the castle along which, Jon said, demure Edwardian ladies with parasols had once paraded. As distinct from a volatile Viking in a motorbike jacket and a scruffy little vicar in jeans, a well-worn fleece and tinted glasses.

‘See where that shelf of rock projects?’ he said now. ‘Back of Jemmie’s head hit that with some force, so that were a bit messy, you know, but her face wasn’t damaged. That’s what they say. It’s kind of a – what would you say? – an elemental way to go.’

‘People say you’re dead before you hit the ground,’ Merrily said dully. ‘Or maybe that’s when the parachute doesn’t open.’ She looked up. ‘It doesn’t seem far enough for that.’

The clouds, empurpled by Merrily’s glasses, were foaming now, with not-quite-rain. She walked up to a jagged crevice in the bottom of the rock face or the castle foundations. It was like the beginnings of a cave, or a recess where a statue should be placed – a natural shrine. Someone had left a small posy of flowers in there: anemones.

‘Would’ve smashed every bone in her body,’ Jon Scole said.

‘I thought you said—?’

‘No, I’m thinking Marion now. Would’ve been all rock down here then. I ’spect it’s worn away a lot in eight centuries. And she most likely came from the top.’

‘It’s a very violent way to go,’ Merrily said. ‘A tumult of emotion there. A feeling of betrayal, sure, but she’d also just killed the man she’d loved. Absolute desolation.’

‘You talk like Robbie,’ Jon said.

‘What?’

‘Robbie… the way he’d talk you through it. This little stunted kid in a woolly hat under a lantern in the dark. He didn’t use big words like “desolation” but he’d tell you about all these enemy soldiers swarming up the rope ladder, swords and knives coming out. The guards and retainers not expecting it, having their throats cut. Stone stairs all slippery with blood. Marion running up ahead of them, wi’ blood all over her nightdress and her hands soaked from hacking to death, as you say, the man she loved. And I remember, Robbie said she was sick. He said she had to stop on the stairs to be sick. I mean, that’s not in the story, is it?’

‘Rings true, though. If you imagine all the adrenalin and the extreme violence. The heavy action going on all around, with the enemy pouring in. Everything happening so fast, and her own frenzied reaction when she worked out what she’d let happen. And then she looks back for a moment, realizes what she’s just done to Arnold de Lisle, and her stomach…’

Jon Scole smiled. ‘You want a part-time job?’

A twig snapped under Merrily’s shoe, and she spun round.

‘You’re even scaring yourself,’ Jon said.

‘Was he that vivid about all the ghost stories? Robbie?’

‘Fair to say that were probably his best.’

‘Because if it wasn’t an accident and he killed himself because he couldn’t bear to leave his beloved Ludlow, why did he jump off the wrong tower? Why didn’t he jump off Marion’s tower?’

Jon blew out his lips. ‘Got me there. I mean, I remember he used to say we couldn’t really be sure of anything, because a lot of the castle were built afterwards – after Marion died, that is, which was back in the reign of Henry II or somewhere around there. So it would’ve all looked different, then, anyway.’

‘But Marion didn’t throw herself off the keep. That’s a certainty, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a longer drop, though. You can go right to the top. You’d be more sure of a result.’ Jon Scole walked over to the ancient yew, fingered its swarthy, resinous skin. ‘If this old bugger could talk.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe it can. A lot of mysticism around yew trees.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘All about immortality, Mary. Yews go on for ever. Some of them are two thousand years old. They’ve always got them in churchyards, and sometimes they’re older than the church.’

‘I don’t think that’s my kind of immortality,’ Merrily said. ‘Rooted in one spot, for ever and ever.’

‘That would depend on the spot,’ the woman said.

It was hard to say how long she’d been standing there, on the edge of the path, her back to the river and the hills and the forestry. She wasn’t wearing a cape, just one of those ankle-length Barbour stockman’s coats, in dark blue, fastened to the top, the storm-flap half covering her chin.

Merrily thought,
How quiet she looks, how demure, how genteel
.

‘Actually, I understood that yew trees did well in churchyards because they thrived on corpses,’ the woman said.

28

I
T WAS STRANGE
, the fame thing. You told yourself that you would never be overawed by people just because you’d seen them on TV or they were in the Cabinet or the Royal Family. Experience had told you that movie stars and government ministers were often narrow and paranoid, and that power not only corrupted, it reduced.

But it was different with someone who had been famous in the days when you’d been impressed by celebrity and notoriety. There was some part of you that wasn’t going to let go of that, and the old shiver went through Merrily.

‘Historians say the sacred tree of the Druids was the oak.’ That voice of dark green glass. ‘But the Druids wouldn’t have got it that wrong.’

Merrily said nothing, but found she was nodding, in that instinctive, subservient way she always despised. Still, oaks versus yews wasn’t something she had an opinion on, anyway.

‘I love and venerate them,’ Mrs Pepper said. ‘Some protected oaks on my land were apparently removed. No big deal, oaks are all right – solid, dependable, functional, but they haven’t got the intellect, or the cunning. Or the true key to survival. Isn’t that right, Jonathan?’

‘If you say so, ma’am.’ Jon Scole bowed his head – he actually did that.

‘So my yew – I’ve got this incredible yew at home – something ensured that it was left well alone when they took out the oaks. Because removing the yew would have been a very bad thing to do, wouldn’t it? Even Jonathan knows that.’

Jon Scole did another small bow; if there was an underlying disrespect here, it wasn’t immediately obvious. Mrs Pepper came up onto the path, her long coat making a soft, slithery sound around her. She approached the tree.

‘In the great yew-tree scheme of things, this one’s still pretty young, but it was born out of death.’ Talking as if she was addressing a larger group. ‘The yew communicates nature’s most important message about death within life, life within death.’

She had the rhythm going now: the glistening, seamless voice which used to step down, mid-song, into the spoken word without losing the flow. Merrily tried to bring up all the loony images: the sanitary goods under the misericords, the bodies rolling in the ivy among the graves, the lime mix fortified with pubic hair. Somehow, none of this diminished her.

‘I’m going to do the lecture now – short one, don’t worry. Here’s what happens: after one or two centuries, the heart of the tree begins to die, which is why so many of them are hollow. But the outer layer just goes on growing around the hollow space, and the tree gets wider and thicker. When a branch breaks off, the yew self-heals and puts out new shoots. And they go on like that for sometimes thousands of years.’

‘Immortality,’ Jon said. ‘Awesome.’

The sky was a deep, soft grey now, and Mrs Pepper shone against it. Her plaited hair had the remains of many colours in it, a woven rainbow. She bared her teeth, which were small and mischievously pointed, and her big eyes were a startling turquoise.

‘And what’s really cunning about the yew is that the death of the heartwood eradicates the rings by which you can tell how old the tree is. So the yew becomes totally fucking ageless… my kind of tree.’

She opened her arms and embraced the yew, and put out her tongue to its warty pigskin trunk, Merrily thinking,
Spare us the theatrics, please…

… As Belladonna began to lick the bark of the yew tree, a slow, intense, liquid lapping.

‘For God’s sake!’ Merrily yelled. ‘It’s pois—’

Bell Pepper looked over her shoulder, gaze locked on Merrily’s, tongue curling up around her upper lip then slowly retracted between small, pointed teeth.

‘Country girl, eh?’

‘I just know it’s very poisonous,’ Merrily said. ‘To animals, anyway. It kills cows and horses. Another reason it’s said they were planted in churchyards was so that farmers would keep their cattle out.’

‘Predates both farming and churchyards, sweetheart – even Jonathan knows that.’

Mrs Pepper bent her head on one side, kissed the tree lavishly, with her mouth open. And then she moved away, smiling, the neck of her coat undone, her throat exposed, turning to Merrily.

‘So who are you, darling? You’re not the woman?’

‘Uh… this is Mary,’ Jon Scole said. ‘Mary, this is… Bell.’

‘Hello,’ Merrily said. ‘Bell.’

Bell looked cross. ‘Jonathan, I’m not sure you heard me. I said, is this the woman?’

Jon Scole seemed worried for a few moments. He looked down at the base of the tree, hacking his trainer into the dust, hands in his pockets nervously flapping his motorbike jacket and making his chains rattle. When he looked up, though, his old smile was returning. He didn’t look at Merrily, but he beamed at Bell Pepper.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s right. This is the woman.’

A face projected onto an already-fraught night by blue emergency beacons… that was just an image. This quiet confrontation on a mild, cloudy afternoon was something else. Especially when the face – this icon of punk-goth perversity – was suddenly behaving entirely in accordance with the legend.

Tonguing the yew, for heaven’s sake!

Merrily trying to be dismissive – maybe Belladonna just wasn’t getting enough attention these days, maybe that was the answer to all of it – so not picking up, at first, on what Jon Scole was doing.

This is the woman?

‘Oh, shit, this is really unfair,’ Jon said. ‘Mary hasn’t the faintest idea what we’re talking about. I haven’t even told her about any of this yet. We’d just, like, walked over here, and I were— I’m sorry, Mary, I was gonna put it to you later. Like, I know you don’t just do this for everybody and money doesn’t make any difference, but I thought maybe this once, you know?’

Merrily stayed silent. Jon Scole tossed back his flaxen locks and put his hands together, as if in prayer. His gaze locked on to Merrily’s and he raised an eyebrow fractionally.

‘Bell’s house – just down there.’ Tipping a thumb towards the river. ‘I was gonna ask you to take a look at it. See if you got anything?’

Now he was looking at her hard, his mouth slightly smiling, his eyes imploring.

‘I see,’ Merrily said.

‘As a psychometrist,’ Jon said. ‘As, uh, a psychic.’

Mrs Pepper said, ‘I’m sorry… Mary? Is it Mary? I must’ve made a very unfavourable first impression. This boy tends to bring out the worst in me.’

‘It’s just his way,’ Merrily said.

‘So I’m going to carry on with my walk,’ Bell refastened her coat. ‘Let you two work this out.’

She moved off, the way they’d come, up towards The Linney and the centre of the town. Her feet were bare inside skimpy sandals, and it occurred to Merrily that she could well be entirely naked under the stockman’s coat.

Or maybe that was just the legend talking.

***

Down the path, now, the castle opening out on their left, as they walked, Jon Scole trampling last year’s brambles.

‘I’m not gonna apologize for this, Mary. You wanted to get close to her, this is your chance.’

‘You set me up,’ Merrily said.

‘I were thinkin’ on me feet. I said I’d help you and I have. I told you about her, the way she is: thinks she senses, but she wants someone to help her know. If I told her you were clergy, you wouldn’t get within a mile, and if she knew you were an exorcist… she wants her ghosts exorcizing like she wants a double mastectomy.’

Merrily zipped up her fleece, sank her hands into its pockets, the day swirling around her, out of control.

‘She said she gets strong feelings coming off the house,’ Jon said. ‘I say, why don’t you get a medium in? She goes dead sneery – she’s like, Oh, I used to go to mediums once, spiritualist churches, they were a joke. Plus, they kept bringing God into it, doing little prayers.’

‘Isn’t her house a new house, strictly speaking?’

‘Built out of the ruins of the old, though. She reckons it was connected with the castle. She’s opened up a pathway so she can walk up here, to the yew. See, this is where it begins. Bell’s walk. A big circle… up The Linney, through the churchyard, down to St Leonard’s graveyard – route marked out by ancient yews… and then back through the town.’

‘OK, I’m getting the picture. What did you tell her about me?’

‘Well… it wasn’t about you to begin with. This goes back to me saying, look, Bell, some mates of mine, they’re psychic investigators – which is true, they got all the kit and they’ve had some good results. Why don’t we come in, I say, give your place a full going-over? She says forget it. Because, what it is, she doesn’t trust anybody. She thinks they’re gonna talk about it, sell the story. And she doesn’t trust me because I make money out of it, and she’s been ripped off too many times by fakes and phoneys. So I say, OK, I know somebody – a psychic, a psychometrist – who’s so red hot she won’t do it for money. In fact she won’t do it at all unless it’s to further her researches, know what I mean? The real thing. Well, she was interested, I could tell straight off she was interested.’