Now Lincoln’s co-authored book was a best-seller. Christ and the secretive French freemasonry on everyone’s lips. Last spring Alison had promised to buy me a copy of it for my birthday, but that wouldn’t be happening. The unwanted birthday a mere three weeks away.
Then I remembered how, despite being engaged, a more subdued Stephen had returned to the north-west. Under that salty, southern sun, he’d undergone a kind of Damascene conversion – except his was in reverse. Away from the Church, its power and obscene wealth. What he also called ‘the oppression of the truth.’ This delivered in the same tone he’d just used with me on the phone.
Clear of Wetheringsett, I muttered a silent curse. Surely Longstanton shouldn’t be that far…
*
I’d been on the road for long enough, and as my wipers swung back and fore, clearing my view, I spotted yet another unmemorable village, dominated by a dour-looking church, which reminded me I’d neither faced an altar since my parents’ funeral, nor had I any wish to. What I’d witnessed on Nottingham’s streets and more recently in France on two equally grim occasions, only reinforced my belief in that we humans are a sick joke. And yes, doomed.
Just then, with the downpour attacking the car roof and something unseen being crunched beneath my wheels, a strange smell I couldn’t quite place, invaded the interior. Sweetly rotting, and yet… My Gran’s compost heap came first to mind. A huge affair in the far corner of her garden, which every summer stank to high Heaven.
But this wasn’t summer. And she was long dead.
Then I recalled those crime scenes where the deceased had been left for weeks in their flat. Or to rot unseen in Sherwood Forest…
I slowed down, sniffing from where the source of this smell might be. First, I tried my glove box, then the map holder set into my door, now home to a chamois leather and a torch. Nothing remotely vegetative. More like that of decomposed animals. Or even…
Don’t go there, I told myself, steering round a small roundabout, towards a turning off the B117 east of Eye, which Stephen had warned me to watch out for. This became a straight, less wide road with, as far as I could see, yet more flat farmland on either side. Another settlement came and went, as did that nauseating smell, and although my watch showed two-thirty, it was as if night had settled outside.
Then, out of the blue came a faded sign.
LONGSTANTON WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS.
At last.
Having navigated a sudden avenue of black firs with the highway now almost waterlogged, to admit relief at reaching the far end, would have been an understatement. More so when I recognised the tall, mean spire of St. John the Martyr, which Stephen had so clearly described to me. Like an elongated needle, its tip seemed to pierce the baleful sky. A solitary structure serving almost as a warning, I thought, drawing closer; shivering despite my coat. But for what exactly? And why? Yet, along its side elevation, behind the three arched windows, lurked a dull light. Nothing as decorative as stained glass, I noticed, shivering again. Spooks having a party, maybe. It seemed that kind of place.
But why had that awful smell returned? And, faintly, the sound of bells?
I opened my window, letting the rain drench my head, thinking of my comfortable lounge in Lea Villa with its warm, gas fire. All too late. I was here, with no immediate going back. However, just before I turned into Wombwell Lane - the final leg of my journey - my cell phone rang from its perch on the passenger seat. I snatched it up, thinking again of Alison. That she might have had a change of heart. But no…
Idiot.
It was Catherine Vickers. Her voice cracking with worry.
“John?” She began. “Where are you?”
“By your church.”
“St John the Martyr?”
St Jean le Martyr?
I felt cold all over. Was this to be France 1986 all over again?
“If you say so.”
“Thank God.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Please get here quick as you can. It’s Stephen…”
The line went dead. With a jumping pulse, I steered the pristine Citroën on to a muddy, unlit track where at the end, my headlights picked out a pale-faced woman wearing a hooded mac. As I pulled up, I noticed my rear-view mirror was filled by that same looming spire. Blacker than the sky. Blacker then even the colony of silent crows clustered in the surrounding bare trees.
2. STANLEY.
Thursday 15th July 1920. 9.30 a.m.
Everything’s so damned hot. Even the pitchfork’s iron handle Pa’s given me to clean out the pig pens. Why me? I keep asking mesen? Why not that good-for-nothing Johnny Foreigner still snoring away in the barn? To be honest, I’ve half a mind to jab both prongs into his black belly and hear him squeal, just like our hogs at the Michaelmas killing.
Sweat were running into me eyes and the pig shit stink blocked me nose, so I tied me neckerchief around me face and set to. Separating straw from the rest. Me guts in revolt.
“Don’t leave them pigs too long in the yard,” Pa had instructed from the comfort of his armchair in the farmhouse. “Or they’ll burn. Then where’d we be?”
I’d not replied. Never did. What were the point? He’d beat me down every time, like he did whenever he cud with Ma. Me the slave. The workhorse of Wombwell Farm. Sometimes I wished I’d joined up with the Norfolk Regiment like most of them others round here, and bin one of the glorious fallen. Yes, glorious, because what the feck were glorious about me life now?
Forty-one wasted years…
The army’d said I had a job to do here for king and country. Feeding all the ungrateful spongers, more like. But that weren’t the real reason, was it? Only me and the birds know what that were. And they’ve probably all been shot by now.
Enough.
I gripped the pitchfork lower down its shaft and, holding it up like a lance, made for the hay barn. Even though the sun beat down on its old tin roof, inside was as black as night. Two crows left the main beam and brushed past me as I stood in the entrance beating out those flies still trapped in me hair.
I thought again of Ma and Pa with their wrinkly, white feet up, waiting for the pig money to roll in. Money I were making for them, and yet they’d still not made a Will. Or so they’d said. If all this were to be mine, I thought, searching again for the stowaway from Mauritius who’d crawled to our door a month ago, I’d sell it quicker than a blink of me eye. I’d move to London. See some life. Be anonymous. Even find mesen a nice piece of meat because no-one here had ever looked at me in that way, which is why, last spring I’d let that dumb mawther Susan Deakins from Byre Cottage have it front and back three times and once more for luck.
I’ve still kept her liberty bodice button that fell off at the time. Surely, I were allowed one little souvenir?
*
Now, where were he? That waste of black skin?
“Oi, you?” I yelled, making me cough up and spit out a ball of dried stuff. “Where ye hiding?”
I used the pitchfork’s prongs to prod around, from the old, rusted tractor in one corner to a reeking pile of sheepskins in the other. We’d always meant to take them to the tannery, but then the war had come, and we’d got rid of our two herds of Suffolks. I tossed a few aside and saw not only a moving carpet of maggots, but him. Lying on his side. A bony hip stuck up like a blade through his overalls. I kicked his upper leg first. Then his backside. He groaned; shifted a bit, covering his face with an even more bony hand. His nails scaly, grey.
“Get up ye skunk,” I said. “There’s work to do.”
That hand clamped over his face even tighter. I weren’t used to disobedience or anyone ignoring me. Not even the pigs. Which reminded me they’d soon be fried out in the yard. I noticed the incomer’s overall’s pocket hung open, so I shoved me fingers inside it hoping to find a coin. Even a half-smoked Woodbine, but no. They found something hard, sort of round. Ridged, cool to the touch.
I pulled it out and in the then semi-darkness, real
ised it were a shell. The kind you find on any beach near here. Damaged round the edges like torn lace, yet when I looked closer, saw on the inside, a set of letters written in what looked like dark, dried blood. Don’t ask me what they meant. Never could read nor write. Always too busy here to go to school… Summat else Ma and Pa got wrong.
I began pulling his greasy, curly hair. Angelid Menelos were his name. But from now on, to make things easier, he’d be The Monkey. This waster who Doctor Lovell claimed had stowed away on some old boat beached up at Cloverhithe.
Why ‘The Monkey,’ you might ask? Because to my way of thinking, any animal with a nose gets far more pity than a human with the same.
3. SARAH.
Thursday 15th July 1920. 10 a.m.
It seemed as if my terrible dream had lasted all night. Full of colour and noise, even smells, but nothing like the ones I had here in Hampshire. This was somewhere quite different. A vast sky and far horizons. Of mysterious, black-robed men chanting to the doleful clang of bells…
But it wasn’t that which had woken me in the half-empty bed, nor the storm raging outside our cottage, but a strange smell.
In summer, on our Forest’s common land, if any of the stock died in deep undergrowth, it could lie unnoticed for days, even weeks, despite my husband Will’s vigliance. But the odour of its death was never repulsive. Unpleasant and strong, certainly, but quite different to what had made me sit up screaming.
It wasn’t until Buck, our ten-year-old son appeared at our bedroom door at eight o’clock, did I realise that not only was his father gone, but his clothes too, from the chair.
“Where’s Dad?” He’d run to the window. “Not out in this weather, I hope.”
What happened next was to remain a rain-soaked blur, even when the police and Verederers’ Court later plied me with questions about that frightening night. However, the one exception to my memory loss surely belonged to Hell itself. Finding my husband’s makeshift grave.
*
It took me and both children half an hour to bathe the deep cut at the back of his head and scrape the mud from his nose, mouth and ears. Several times we thought he’d stopped breathing. After that, and eight bucket-laden trips back and fore to our cottage’s outside water tap, did he finally murmur, “thank God.”
Not since his return from Gallipoli with a small lump of shrapnel in his head and thinking his livelihood here was over, had he seemed so fearful that we’d be homeless all over again.
“You couldn’t have buried yourself,” argued Mollie, once we’d made him comfortable by the fire. At twelve years old, she still had the directness of youth. “So, who did it to you?”
“You must have seen whoever it was,” added Buck leaning towards his father’s nearest ear. Red and raw from the cleaning. “Are you scared to say?”
At this, the bravest most honest man who walked God’s earth, stiffened. His hands clenched together. “No, son. You know me better than that. I’ll speak when I’m ready.”
*
But could I wake him after that? Not for love nor money, and it wasn’t until three o’clock on an oddly sunny afternoon, that his puffy eyes finally opened, and he reared up, fixing on our front room’s one window as if the ghost of his hated father had passed by.
“Draw those damned curtains!” he shouted. Even his bloated eyelids couldn’t disguise his panic. “He’s got to think I’m dead. That some wild animal’s dug up my body.”
“Who’s he?”
“You shouldn’t ask.”
He coughed from the effort of speaking then turned to me. “Can’t you see the danger we’re all in? I hope to God you didn’t leave any foot prints…”
I stared at this man who, since the Great War’s end, had often seemed a stranger. Yet someone who’d kept food in our larder and had even saved Buck’s life at birth when the umbilical cord had wound too tightly around his little neck.
His matted, brown hair grown long since leaving the Royal Hampshire regiment, and normally tied back with a lucky horsehair cord, straggled over his broad shoulders. That curved weal on his left cheek still raw and bloody. The mouth which in our rare, intimate moments, had given me such pleasure, was an almost invisible line. Bare feet, with traces of dried mud between his toes…
“Why?”
“If I live, you die. Now, do you understand?”
Holy Jesus.
I shivered and crossed myself as he coughed again. Despite the afternoon sun filtering through the curtains, I felt cold. Dead cold…
“Was he Matthew Crane?” I ventured, thinking of the dour, young northener come south to help Will with the Forest’s stock. Too full of ambition, leaving little room for anyone else.
“No.” Will said too quickly, then turned towards the door, frowning. “Fetch the kids. They must stay indoors.”
“For how long? I mean, it’s summer. You know how they love to…”
Those huge fists suddenly banged on the wooden arms of his chair. “Everyone here must do as I say! There’ll be no second chances.”
“Why I should fetch the constable,” Mollie said from the kitchen. She was baking something, perhaps for him, and the homely aroma helped drive away that foulness featured so vividly in my dream, making Oak Leaf Cottage seem normal again.
“You’ll do no such thing. Unless you want to be fed to the wolves.” He made a snarling noise from the back of his throat and licked his lips. Mollie screamed and ran off, slamming the door behind her, and it was in the sullen aftermath that I realised nothing here in Swayhurst would ever be the same.
*
Moments later, she and Buck stood close together. Chalk and cheese in every way except for their almost identical height. At almost three years younger, he was catching up fast, and although they both seemed older, like their father; the shine had gone from their eyes. I had to somehow restore it, but not here. Not then.
The tension in our small front room still crackled like a winter fire. Will defending us from what, we couldn’t yet grasp, and Mollie especially, with ideas of her own and no fear of expressing them.
I placed my right forefinger over my lips, but she ignored me,
“I’m obeying no more orders until you, Dad, say who tried to kill you, and why.” She glanced sideways at Buck then me. “We’re not babies. Nor is she.”
Her brother nodded his uncombed head, and caught my eye, drawing my own resentments from their hiding place. A wife who’d wanted to be a nurse, whose parents had died in the Spanish ‘flu pandemic. Whose once robust core had gradually shrivelled. Always waiting for news and dealing with it. There for everyone but herself.
Will tried to leave his chair and failed. Coughed something brownish into an old rag he always used instead of a handkerchief.
“I agree with Mollie,” I said. “Because your head needs proper medical attention, and this potential murderer is still on the loose. You’re being irresponsible and unfair.”
Seeing his eyes begin to water, I stopped. He squeezed them shut.
“Is there anything you might have done to make someone want to bury you alive in such a terrible way?”
“Go on, Dad,” urged Buck, standing next to him. Their likeness remarkable. His smaller hand on that wall of a shoulder. “Whatever it is, we’ll forgive you.”
Will gripped his wrist. Pushed his head into Buck’s dirty old shirt. School had finished for the long summer holidays and both children had, until today, been out gathering berries or with their father, chasing and catching any stray forest ponies. Anything in fact, that the endless days allowed. Their best clothes saved for school and church. We thought ourselves good Christians, yet not like some round here, turned in on themselves.
“I sold a stallion on.” He said suddenly. “The bay with the white blaze.”
Silence save for the rumble of a loaded hay cart churning by along the still-wet lane. “Thinking of us, I was,” he went on, staring at nothing. “An extra fifty pounds is bloody useful, isn’t it?”
&nb
sp; “When?” I challenged him. “Recently?”
“Monday afternoon.” He didn’t look up.
“To whom?”
“Can’t say.”
“Get him back, Dad.” Mollie said. “Or we could be dead next.”
“There has to be more to to it than this,” I added, ashamed to have been emboldened by a twelve-year-old. “Who else is involved? A dealer?”
Another silence in which Buck straightened. Faced his stubborn father like a bare-knuckle fighter. Fists trembling. His right one poised to strike.
“Tell her, or you’ll get this!”
I pulled him towards me, but too late. Will heaved himself from his chair, his weathered face the colour of old meat. His hair a mess of mane…
Who was this man?
And then I remembered the shrapnel wound behind his right ear. How the army doctor had warned of inevitable mood swings and worse than that.
Buck let out a yell before I placed myself between them and took the pain. The terror Will had known from facing the enemy abroad and the loss of what he’d once been, seared my heart, yet my last thought before I fell, and that sunlit room turned grey then black, was to run. All of us. Somewhere safe.
4. JOHN.
Saturday 12th November 1988. 2.45p.m.
The Vickers’ double-fronted, half-timbered house was the only sign of human habitation in Wombwell Lane, tucked away on a bend leading to a field and a ragged fingerpost signed for the church.
Catherine Vickers walked ahead of me, her Wellington boots making a sucking sound with each step. She’d not volunteered any more about Stephen except to say, “it’s all getting a bit weird.”
Nor had she asked how my trip had been in this foul weather. She was worried, alright, and quickened her pace through the open gate and towards the back door where two adults’ bikes stood covered by a black tarpaulin. The ladies’version had a basket jutting from its handlebars, while the other boasted two paniers set on either side of the rear wheel.
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