The Wilding (6 page)

‘Yes, Sir,’ she whispered at last. ‘He talked of it. He’d done somebody a wrong – he had to make amends. He was frightened of dying, Sir.’

‘He told you that?’

‘It wasn’t like telling me, Sir. He didn’t know I was there, not at the end. But he said it over and over. I heard him very clear.’

‘Who was the person? The person he had injured?’

Her eyes swivelled away. ‘He never said.’

It would do no good to press her just then. Instead I said, ‘When did this happen?’

‘Just before Mr Mathew came.’

‘My father arrived because of a letter. That was the letter you gave to the man in the village, wasn’t it?’

‘If you say so, Sir. Mrs Harriet was angry, she didn’t want Mr Mathew here. You won’t tell her it was me that brought him, will you?’

‘I’m a man of my word, Tamar. If you remember anything more –’

She stiffened. ‘Listen – the Mistress –’

On the breeze came my aunt’s voice: ‘Tamar! Tamar!’ The girl gathered up her skirts and ran into the house.

* * *

* * *

As I had informed my mother, there still remained a goodly number of apples to pick and press, but I was not ‘proceeding with all haste’; I dawdled and spun out my time as I pondered what Tamar had told me. Aunt seemed to take pleasure in talking, for once, and was in no hurry to send me away; everything was playing into my hand.

I must not go just yet. A few days more and I might win Tamar’s trust; I was now convinced that, if she chose, she could point to the injured party. She had been with Uncle Robin through his last hours. If he was indeed raving, surely he had spoken the one name that pressed so cruelly on his conscience? As I worked I left the door of the cider-house open, and I waited.

At last, shortly after breakfast one morning, I heard a scraping sound outside.

‘Let me help you, Tamar,’ I said, emerging into the sunshine.

‘Thank you Sir, but the mistress says I keep you from the cider.’

‘Nonsense. Besides, it was I that proposed it; a walk will clear my head. So – where are we taking this most wonderful log?’ I asked playfully. ‘To the wood, perhaps?’

Her eyes widened.

‘You’d be surprised what I know,’ I said, laying a finger to my nose. ‘Here – catch hold of one end.’

Out of the little gate we went and into the wood. This time there was nobody else about; we had the path to ourselves.

‘Won’t my aunt miss you?’ I enquired as we tramped along.

‘She’s gone to market,’ said Tamar.

The cool, fresh air under the trees soothed my spirit. Tamar set a brisk pace; she walked faster, I think, than any woman I have known before or since, stepping easily on the uneven ground and carrying her end of the log without strain. All this she did in her long, heavy gown while holding herself bolt upright. I wondered if she really did wear stays all over, or perhaps no stays at all. Then I thought of other things: of her cleaning Robin’s body in his bed, and laying it out afterwards.

I wondered at my aunt over this business of the laying-out. She should have employed an older woman; it was not usual, perhaps even a little shameful, to give such a job to a young maid. But perhaps Aunt Harriet knew what she did; perhaps Tamar was not a maid in every sense of the word, if my uncle –

I must stop these thoughts, which threatened to taint with lewdness my memory of a man so dear to my father. As soon as I fixed my mind on our progress, however, I realised that we were on the path I had already trodden, the one leading to the place where the woman had slipped away from me. That was it, then: she had been hurrying towards a forbidden meeting, but not with a lover.

‘Tamar,’ I said.

‘Sir?’

‘This old woman we’re visiting – is she the beggar-woman – the one Geoffrey drove away?’

She answered without turning round, ‘Did he?’

Was it my fancy, or was Tamar growing less respectful as we advanced deeper into the wood? It was impossible to read the back of her head. I have lowered myself to oblige a servant, I thought, and this is my reward. My aunt does well to cherish her hereditary rights.

We were approaching the place where the other woman had got away from me. As we reached the holly bush, Tamar slowed and put down her end of the log.

‘Now, Sir, I must show you how to proceed.’

She moved off the path onto the grass slope I had observed before and had taken only a few steps when she dropped through the ground, as one might drop through water, and vanished.

The sweat burst out on my skin.

‘Tamar!’ I called.

Her head popped up out of the grass like a rabbit’s. ‘Leave the log, Sir, and walk down to me. Take care where you put your feet.’

I made my way down. When I had almost reached her the ground gave way and I fell, crying out, into a sort of dry ditch or ha-ha, a wrinkle in the face of Mother Nature running right across the slope but invisible from the top of it. Tamar and I were again side by side.

‘From here, Sir, you just look for that oak’ – she indicated a fine tree to our left – ‘and walk along towards him, and in no time you’re there.’

‘There’ was such a place as I have never seen before and hope never to see again. It can only be described by the word
hovel
: an opening into the bank, partly shielded by hurdles smeared with clay and hung with scraps of oiled woollen cloth. At the entrance lay a mess of grey ashes, remnant of a past fire, perhaps the very fire I had smelt from the path.

Next to the opening stood a blackthorn bush from whose prickly arms dangled small greyish objects, threaded along with bird bones and nutshells on wisps of sheep’s wool. These I took to be the amulets of which Rose had spoken.

‘Let me warn her first.’ Tamar pushed aside a spider’s web and entered the darkness within. Left outside, I felt equally compelled to follow her and to flee; these opposing impulses so warred within me that I was paralysed, unable to move in either direction.

‘She wishes to thank you,’ said Tamar, reappearing. ‘Come this way, Sir.’

Going in, I thought of foxes, of witches, of the Black Woodcutter. The darkness at first blinded me, but as my sight cleared I found myself in a cool, ferny place smelling of clay and damp.

‘Through here, Sir,’ came Tamar’s voice from the shadows. Moving forwards, I stretched out my hands to protect myself and felt one of them graze against somehing smooth and hard: stone. I was, I realised, in a cave. The beggar-woman had found herself a shelter against the rain and the wind, one that no farmer or landlord could pull down, and she was snugly earthed. I could smell her now: the stale scent of a female beast in its lair.

‘How long has she lived here?’ I asked.

‘She comes and goes,’ was the answer.

‘Surely she’s too old to be travelling?’

‘Is she, Sir?’ Tamar said. ‘Pray ask her.’ At that moment my foot knocked against something soft; I recoiled in distaste as Tamar’s laughter rang out: ‘Mind yourself, Joan!’

The softness at my feet wheezed and shifted.

‘If you stand aside, Sir, you’ll see better,’ said Tamar, and I realised that I was blocking the light. I moved to the left and two milky dots appeared in the darkness: the beggar’s eyes.

At first I could see no more than that, not even that she had a head, but soon I was able to make out an indistinct shape. Swaddled in rags, the crone was sitting on the ground, her back propped against a wall of rock. This place served her, I suppose, for dining room, bedchamber and everything else besides, and when not wandering about begging alms she had nothing to do but sit there. God knows how long she had waited thus, motionless, for Tamar to return. I had not thought Englishwomen capable of it, only savages.

‘Thank you for your great kindness, Sir,’ she said, and at those words I started, for despite the cracked harshness of her speech, put out of tune by cold winds and wood-smoke, it seemed to me that I had heard it before.

‘Mistress, do you know me?’

‘How should I, Sir?’

There it was again, that faint familiar note. Tamar began, ‘She has a deal of pain in her back, and –’

‘Christ preserve us!’ The air over my head split into screeching and scrabbling; something scaly clawed at my hair and was gone before I could strike at it. The women roared with laughter.

‘It’s nothing,’ shouted Tamar.

‘Nothing?’ The thing, whatever it was, some loathsome bat perhaps, was still flapping in the darkness of the cave.

‘Only Hob.’ She smacked her lips, inviting it to approach. ‘He won’t hurt you, Master Jonathan.’

Concealed in some fold of the rock, the bird now commenced chuckling to itself in a wicked little goblin voice. One word –
tomorrow
– coming out very plain, the women again began to laugh.

‘Tell me, Mistress,’ I said, addressing the old woman, ‘is it true that you can read and write? I hear you make amulets to cure straying husbands.’

These words put a stop to their laughter. ‘No amulets, nothing like that,’ said the old one, somewhat unwisely since I had walked past a row of them on my way into the cave.

‘Just good fortune, no harm,’ Tamar put in. ‘You know there’s no harm, don’t you, Sir?’

I answered nothing to that; I was not displeased to have brought them up so short. Again I addressed the old woman.

‘But you can read and write?’

‘I can guess at some words.’

‘And write them?’

‘No.’

‘I know someone who says you write like a scholar.’

She cackled. ‘Do you hear that, Tamar? Folk will say anything!’

Just then a cloud dissolved and a branch shifted in the wind, so that a sunbeam struck deep into the cave, right to the place where the crone was sitting. Again I started, for (allowing for dirt and neglect) Joan was not so old as I had fancied. I was not talking to a woman of sixty, but one per haps twenty years younger.

‘Can you write your name?’

She shook her head. It occurred to me that Tamar and I should be getting back to End House; now that I could find my way into the cave, I could always return later.

‘Well, I wish you joy of the log,’ I said. I was about to add, ‘and will fetch you more,’ but on consideration I did not like her enough to promise that.

‘God bless and keep you, Sir,’ she whined in the tones of the professional beggar.

‘Farewell.’ Disgust rising in me, I turned and made my way out of the cave, Tamar shuffling after. It was a relief to emerge into the light and air of the outside world. I yawned and stretched, then looked about me and cried out: ‘Tamar! Who’s that?’

‘Who?’

‘Over there,’ I said, pointing. As she turned, I plucked an amulet from the thorns outside the cave door.

She strained forward like a dog that scents game. At last she said, ‘There’s nobody there.’

‘A man in a blue cloak.’

Tamar shook her head. ‘Gone.’

I could not tell if she was glad of this or not. I remembered what Rose Barnes had said about men visiting the witch, and wondered was it perhaps Tamar they came to see.

* * *

At last, in the privacy of my chamber, I was able to unravel the amulet, which was fragile and cost me some pains to penetrate without tearing. Unwrapped, it consisted of a piece of writing in the shap wridiamond, with a scrap of rag stained reddish-brown, a few hairs and what looked like a dried mushroom folded inside it. The paper had been scrolled around them to form a lozenge-like shape and then sealed with some sort of gum. It struck me that the outside of Joan’s cave must be well sheltered from rain, for the writing, though faint and purplish – it looked like blackberry juice, or sloe – was still clear. It appeared to be a love charm. The legend, complete with marks, ran thus: